Friday, 10 April 2009

• I wish I was eighteen again...

  ...well, no.  Not really.  (Although I do have that song stuck in my head, now....thank me very much. What was I thinking?)
  
  But you know how they're saying Facebook is being taken over by my generation, and I believe it.  In the months since I reluctantly joined, I've become completely addicted to it--not in a harmful way, it's just that it's brought back so many people I have loved and lost through the years.  You can't move around as much as I had to, and be able to stay in constant contact with everyone.  Just doesn't happen.
  
  I've never been someone who romanticizes her past--some of it, in fact, has been the stuff of nightmares, all the more nightmarish for being true.  I have spent a lot of time thinking about it, though, mostly in the ache to understand what seemed unfathomable.  Some of the answers I will never know; some have been lost to time, some lost, sadly, to death.  But as I've said here before, I need to be able to come to terms with things, even if the 'terms' end up being something I've worked out for myself in the absence of the other involved, shape it into something I can live with.  (Sort of like the logic in the Water Babies books of long ago--'if it isn't so, it ought to be.'  Works for me.)
  
  If I had been inclined to think things were better, sweeter, than they were, some of the things I've learned in the past months would certainly have knocked it out of me! And yet, for all that, there has been a much needed peace that could only come from finally learning the answer to not just 'how could you...' but 'why did you?'  If you have thought, all these years, as I have, that you were unlovable, unloved, and so could be left behind...it is wonderfully healing to know you were loved, and very much so.  I never thought of outside influences coming between me and the boy I loved, only of a lack in myself. 
  
  And if you moved around as much as I have, it's amazingly sweet to learn you are remembered when you didn't expect to be.  And to find that the 'cool' kids who wouldn't have spoken much to you then, are very nice to you now; time really is the great equalizer, and almost none of us are living the lives we thought we'd be--the golden girls got kicked around, too, and the nobodies, like me, are remembered much more kindly than I'd have expected. It makes me think all over again of the book I'm reading again for the kabillionth time (see below!) because it shows with painful clarity how high school was a rollercoaster ride of purely wonderful and purely agony, often in the same week, sometimes even in the same day.  How you couldn't breathe for laughing...and couldn't breathe for weeping.  It makes me remember, too, a thought I read some years ago about 'how painful it is to be fifteen, when you feel so much and know so little.'  A few e-mails exchanged with an old boyfriend brought me right back to those days of uncertainty, of knowing that all  I knew for certain was how I loved him--never how much, or even if--he loved me. 
  
  We had a poetry contest at the library a few weeks ago, and I was one of the judges.  There were good poems and bad, but reading them I was right back there in those high school halls.  It astounds me that after a certain age people think that those were the best days ever, because there was as much angst and heartache, the very same 'no one understands me, no one hears me' that I remember writing in my own poetry--some of which was good, and some of which was bad, and all of which was true, and truly felt.  I couldn't laugh at a teenager's heartache if my life depended on it, remembering my own so well.
  
  And another thing....remembering the secrets I buried, it saddens me now to learn how many secrets my friends had, too.  We didn't know enough to trust each other then, I guess; I'd like to think I was always open to the 'you can tell me anything' mindset that good friends have.  But somewhere, somehow, some of them didn't know that about me, and I wish they had.  Some of what we kept secret shouldn't have had to be; how much easier might our lives have been if we could have told the truth many years sooner.  Who can say....
  
  But it isn't all sadness, of course.  It's been a wonderful time of sharing pictures, then and now; of conversations about parties and plays that have multiple input, of creating a whole and vivid memory that shimmers in the now as much as it did then.  It's celebrating each other's children and pets, marriages and accomplishments, and comforting and uplifting through all the hard times, too.  That's what friends really are, what we always were, what we still want to be.  It's seeing one another again and not really seeing lines and extra pounds and scars, but only who we were then. 
  
  After all...love remains.
  
  
  i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
  my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
  i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
  by only me is your doing, my darling)
  i fear
  no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
  no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
  and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
  and whatever a sun will always sing is you
  
  here is the deepest secret nobody knows
  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
  and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
  higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
  and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
  
  i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
  
  ee cummings
  
  
  
  
  
  

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