Scar Tissue

At what point do references to a past relationship simply die away, forgotten, to be remembered occasionally with a certain word, or a place that brings the memories back, surprising, unfamiliar, because you no longer recognise that person as yourself.

Does it die, or is it suffocated by the new memories overlaying it with new experiences, a new relationship? And if another relationship doesn’t happen along, then what to do with that point of reference that has become stale and well past its use-by date.

People talk of moving on. "You’re over that now, aren’t you?" Well, yes. The day I walked out the door I had accepted the fate of it. But what am I to do with the decade of memories?

The fact is that a great deal of what I experienced during that time, was experienced as a "we" and I feel somehow fraudulent to try and rewrite the experience as an "I". But then I hate the way it makes me sound like a sad, pathetic, lost soul who cannot move beyond where she was. That isn’t how it is, but I can so easily see how it would look like that in others’ eyes. Although, should that matter? I’m not going to pretend that a large part of my life never existed just to placate those who think it’s better to hide the parts of life that don’t follow a well structured plan.

When having lunch with my mother the other day, I told her how sometimes when I am coming home I have flashes of one of my cats dead in the street. It isn’t something I want to imagine, but sometimes it feels like I need to be prepared for the possibility. After all, my much loved cat Billy was killed by a car out the front of my home, and I have retrieved a neighbour’s lifeless cat from nearly the same spot only a month or so after Billy died.

My mother looked at me as though she simply couldn’t find the words to express how my thoughts were completely alien to her. "Why invite sadness into your life?" her face said.

Maybe it is because I have always known, for as long as I can remember, that happiness in my life is temporary and not to be trusted; slippery as soap and likely as not to pull your feet out from under you just when you’re thinking you’ve got your balance again.

So I’ve lived my life looking in the shadows for the disappointments that, undoubtedly, are waiting, dull-eyed and cold to the touch.