pieces

Do you ever feel like pieces of your life may never completely come into their own?
Like there are things that will never quite fit right again?

This will sound convoluted, but it is like a mosaic. A mosaic comes together from the broken parts of many different things. An image, often beautifully fractured yet whole, comes to be. But sometimes it feels even though mine is an ever forming mosaic there are pieces that will never be able to go. They are parts of of a different story. One that I treasure but don't know how to reconcile and thus don't know how to make part of this emerging narrative and image.

When I think of my past and what is often referred to as my "former life" I think that as time passes and I build a new life - what happens to the sacredness of those memories? Because one cannot live in the past and must forgive themselves the ugly and even the beautiful they have to take it all and wrap it up into somtething whole and, then what? Set it free? Bury it? Carry it?

Today the subject of this past is my marriage - a relationship of nearly 7 years with someone. One that as time passes slips away into a deep and distant history. It's supposed to I am told. It has to I know. But the fragments that remain continue woven into my very identity. When I got a call this morning about some pictures that he is sending me, ones he found when going through the old albums, pictures that did not pertain to him but me on hiking trips with youth groups etc. I felt the pang of an eraser. An eraser digging into my memory. And then I felt the pain of having left him to clean up a shared life - where I got to move to an empty city with no furniture, no buildings to remind me of special times, no corners to turn that will freeze my spirit or snatch the ability of my brain to move forward. But him with an apartment of memories, of a table and chairs we searched for, a couch we fought about, in a room we shared. While he is less sentimental than me I have a difficult time imagining staying in a place that held so much.

What Leonard Cohen says in, "Is This What You Wanted":

You were the promise at dawn,
I was the morning after . . .

And is this what you wanted
to live in a house that is haunted
by the ghost of you and me?

Which I played for him a year or two ago and he thought was sort of ridiculous. Mainly because LC also sings about tangerines I believe. Nonetheless, there are pieces of this story that I do not know how to keep and do not want to forget. Because forgetting erases meaning, or so it seems.

And thus my fear of marriage comes in, but that is probably for another blog because this one is quite lengthy and quite heavy. Particularly for me.

And by the way I do know how this sounds, like one who has not let go. But is it so bad to not know how to hold your history especially in light of my current happiness in love. I want the same for him - and I would really like it sooner rather than later. But that is in part for selfish reasons.