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Reading (as I sometimes do) bits and pieces of my older (two decades+) writing, I'm struck by a line:
Speaking of friends who are off elsewhere, [V.]'s supposed to be coming in on the 28th. Whether that actually happens or not is debatable, but that was her plan as of a couple of weeks ago. I haven't talked to her since then.
At the time, my ex and I were in the process of slowly coming apart. The distance (several hours between us by car) was too much. Maybe the change in our lives was too much. Eventually, they stopped responding to me. Ghosting, before that was a coined term. Was the fact that I wrote the above in my journal maybe something to do with it, too? Re: my ex, I know they used to read my journal. Was there some suspicion of impropriety, some jealousy? V. and I were just friends at that point, though we'd spent a few weeks together the summer previous, both harbouring feelings for the other. I don't think I ever put that part in my journal. I overshared, but not about everything. Regardless, I don't know what they knew.
Unhealthy to ask now, unhealthy to speculate, and the last time we talked more than fifteen years ago, a short message on Facebook to say they'd heard I was getting married. And as much as all this is maybe not helpful, it's interesting to jog my memory about certain things. Names and dates and timelines that would other be forgotten instead coalesce.
I could have been better to them; they could have been better to me. So it goes. We were different people then, and we were young, and it's important to give your (much younger, much more arrogant and headstrong and uncompromising) former self a little slack and grace. We're both happier now, and I don't think would have been happy had we stayed together. We needed what we had to end.
But if this had a hand in [waves arms wildly], do I regret writing it? Maybe a little, but only barely. I don't regret the years I talked with V. after the brief summer we shared together. I don't regret the friendship that carried on over ICQ and AIM for years before we ourselves drifted apart.
Something about rediscovering this old entry is why I still write down my life in quiet corners of the internet. Not because it's a compulsion (though it can also be that), but because it's a record. When you're young, it's easy to recall details of this or that, everything being so close together in time. As I've gotten older, as so much from that era has faded, I've found it invaluable to have something to come back to, something to remind me of who I was.
Because that's part of it, isn't it? As the years pass, then the decades, we're never quite the same at any two moments in time. And having these strange, disconnected paragraphs written by my much-younger self has allowed me a window back, reminding me not just of what I didn't know, but also who was good to me, who wasn't, and who I was right to leave behind.