The Past

Every time I go home to my parents' home, I try and clean out a little more of my stuff. I come from a long and celebrated line of packrats, and so in my old room, squirrelled away, are some pretty crazy things. A lot of old books, some old musical instruments, a bunch of notes from friends and old boyfriends that I kept, a bunch of old notes from school, a few stuffed animals. The books I'm paring down bit by bit, into "things I will never read again" (a very tiny category, admittedly) and "things that I want to bring home for my child". Most of the old toys have already made their way into my house, and most of the stuffed animals would have too had my child shown any interest whatsoever in playing with them. He won't even play with his own, the few that he has, so I cannot imagine bringing my old ones here, into this tiny space, to crowd the toys he does deign to touch. 

This time I delved deep into the back of the closet and found an old box that was elaborately taped shut. Over and over. In layers. It was clear that NO ONE WAS TO TOUCH THIS BOX. It was almost as though I had written DANGER: EXPLOSIVES on the side. I knew what it was instantly: my diaries.

But despite knowing that one thing, I was actually surprised to find what I did inside the box. One diary I had absolutely no recollection of writing, for one thing. And then when I did read them? A whole lot of surprises. 

At some point I should quote some of them here, because my eighth grade angst is as funny as everyone else's (there's actually something about "desirable man meat" from a time in my life when it was quite clear that I had never even been close to such a thing. Oh, and ew for referring to it that way.) but that wasn't the surprising thing I wanted to note. The thing that surprised me most was realizing that what I remember now, at almost-35, and what I wrote then ARE NOT THE SAME. 

Now I understand it when two people have completely different memories of the same event; two different points of view and experiences lead to different memories, even of small things. What I can't quite fathom is how I managed to write about a situation -- actually write it down -- at 15 or 18 or 20, and then remember it, 15 years later, completely differently. 

Now I hasten to add here that I'm not talking about a single incident here. I'm talking about my memories of people. As an example, there's one person from my past that I remember extremely fondly, someone I've held up in my memories as a pretty upstanding person; the diaries recount some pretty negative emotions about that same person that I don't remember having. It's not like I remember events of the night of November 12, 1995 in two different ways; more that there are many subtle nuances of my memories that I have lost. 

I suppose in the end it's merely a matter of time and distance and forgetting of some things. We focus on the things we want to focus on; therefore the relationship from high school which was once beloved but ended in a fiery crash (figuratively) is only recalled with the bitter memories of the end; the next relationship which felt so ideal at the end is remembered with a sweetness that doesn't reflect the exasperation I sometimes felt. 

I haven't read through the diaries in full; I'm not sure that I want to have all those memories downloaded again, and I'm not sure I need to. But even the small tidbits I have read are a good reminder: nothing is ever as bad as you fear, or as bad as you remember. Those events from your past that haunt you? They aren't as bad as you remember. Conversely, nothing is perhaps ever as good as you remember either, but savouring the memories does make for sweet reminiscing later on. 

It's like you can't go wrong with it, really -- so what if you remember the good times as better than they were? Where's the harm in that? And it's always a comfort to try and remember that that boy from 12th grade? Yeah, he might have been an *ss once. But before that? He brought roses.