Landmarks

4am.  I’ve made it through most of the night–a blessing. The past few nights, when I’ve woken this way, W has been there, and he has done what he does, whether deliberately to help or simply because he can’t resist a naked submissive woman in his bed, and stopped my head, got me out of it, rendered me thought-less so that I could sleep again.

I’m home now, and that is not Ad’s way, and so I am here with my thoughts and no way to stop them, no way to exorcise them.

But maybe that isn’t so bad. I have to learn to live with them. I have to make peace with them.

“Write,” Ad says. Because that is what I do. I learn to live with myself and my head and my life by writing.

Last night, when I retreated to the bedroom to cry, Ad told me about a Star Trek episode he watched the other night. In it the main character has to deal with an alien race that has the ability to place the person they are dealing with into any moment in time–based on the moment in that person’s life that has had the strongest impact on him.  This character is brought back time and again to a scene from his life in which he lost his wife to a fire. Whenever he has to deal with the aliens, he is brought back to that moment, time and again.  Finally, in anguish, he asks them why they keep bringing him back there, why they force him to relive it over and over.

“We don’t bring you back here,” they respond. “You do.  This is where you live.”

I’ve been living in this place now for the past few days, living in a place in the past that I didn’t even know existed until this week, though it was there all along.  “You can’t live in that place,” Ad said, as I cried on his chest last night. “You have to let it go; you have to move on. It’s over.”

Yeah, wisdom from Star Trek.  Imagine that.

For the few of you that read this blog, you are probably wondering what’s happened. I can’t–won’t–go into it in detail here, except to say that I found something out about my family earlier this week that has devastated me. I…am coming to terms with it, although it’s taken four days of constant support, love and babysitting on W’s part to get me to this point, where I feel like I can even face the world again. Ad has been there too, but he just started his new job and both he and W knew I shouldn’t be alone, so I holed up at W’s while I hashed through the majority of the pain, fear, recriminations, guilt & anguish.  Now I am back home, learning to live with this rewritten version I have of my past.

We all have landmarks in our lives, moments that define “before” and “after,” giving us reference points to identify who we are at any certain moment in our lives. There is before and after a parent dies, a graduation, the birth of a child, the death of a sibling, a marriage, a divorce, an illness, a job. We all have these markers. But now I am forced to revise all that I thought I knew about my life “then” to include this new landmark.

But I can’t live in that place. The landmark is there. I can’t undo it, I can’t make it go away.  I will never look back to that time now without seeing it there.  But I hope, someday, it isn’t all I see. That it will some day cease to overshadow (and corrupt and corrode and diminish) everything else from that time. I’m living in this now, in this place. Yes, it informs my now, but it isn’t all there is–and it isn’t all there was then either. It was a thing. It happened. And now we–I–just have to move on.