The other day I was walking home from work and out of nowhere came the thought, the happy thought, that I would call Bob. [12/13: I've gotten some questions on this one: did I want to call, did I call? No. Hell, no. What I poorly explained was a thought zipped into my consciousness, unanticipated, undesired, but it was just like the thoughts I used to have when I looked forward to talking to him. As quickly as it came into my head, reality also came to me and the desire was gone. What it amounted to was a sadness that that part of my life is gone.]
I was cleaning out old photos from the computer and stumbled on a cell phone shot from Costco. It was a photo of a label for a sofa that we thought of buying for the loft at the house.
My gmail gigabytes were filling up and I started going through Sent mail until I got into the ones from a little over a year ago. I couldn't look at them one by one and had to just delete everything.
Amazon, for good or ill, remembers everything you ever bought. While looking for something else, I uncovered things I'd bought for our motorhome when we were going to spend last winter in Arizona.
I contacted my oral surgeon to get a summary of charges for this year and her staff included everything for 2012 as well, during months I didn't have a clue what was coming. One date was just before a weekend we spent in Cannon Beach, Oregon with friends.
I see months from last year in the notebook in which I record books I've read, and remember what we were doing and what our plans were. I remember. I also see the months that are empty, when I couldn't concentrate long enough to read a sentence.
My co-volunteer here talks of an upcoming trip to Australia and New Zealand, a reminder that we were to go this past March. All the tickets had been acquired and reservations made, the itinerary complete.
While summarizing copays for my healthcare this year, I saw one to my therapist on March 27, the day I left my house for good.
My telephone's photo roll has screen shots of places we were going to visit on upcoming trips. I haven't been able to pick my way through those yet.
I had to turn off the iPod when the Christmas music I was playing came to one particular song. That one song. He would take me in his arms, dance me around the kitchen, and sing it softly just to me.
I see an Asian woman and my heart turns to ice, to stone. How irrational is that?
I don't go looking for these reminders. I've been trying hard to look forward only, but they appear like knife-edged specters from my past that cut me with a thousand little sadnesses.
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Thought of the day:
I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and
loved and where all your yesteryears are buried deep, leave it any way
except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back
and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it
is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future
lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance. (Beryl Markham - West with the Night)
