Re-Introduction: Distilled, Rather Than Concentrated

19 May 2005 - 21:43

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I have had at least two people in my life call me their scribe, since I keep all e-mails, letters, photos, and artwork exchanged between us. Quite often I ask myself, �What was I thinking of six years ago?�and can pull out an old journal and find out. I don�t own many possessions, but along with my best friend Becky I�ve been obsessed with recording my life and the lives of those I love. However, there was one time I deviated from this behavior: I deleted all correspondence (about one month�s worth) between myself and a person who later showed he had absolutely no regard for me, because I really wanted to move on. It turned out to be a wonderful decision. I had no option of remembering the thousand things that made me care about him in detail. I had no option of beating myself up over the way things ended.

I have deleted nearly two years of material from this diary because I want to allow them to recede as part of my public life, and also to allow everyone who I mentioned in them to forget about my version of those events. I have always tried to be respectful of everyone�s privacy, but the people I write about recognize who they are (and in a few isolated cases, so do their girlfriends, or random people in another part of the country). I am even more careful now of how I present other people, and also much more aware that no matter who appears to be the subject of my prose, I am only ever writing about myself. (Someone I love dearly writes only about himself, even in his paper diaries, because he wishes to hold awareness that his only relationship, ultimately, no matter whom it is expressed through, is with himself. I might try that someday.)

Often when I look back on what I was thinking a few years past I find that it is the very same thing I am contemplating now, perhaps with a twist, or with a different set of characters. I hope this is so not because I�m boring but because there is something constant inside of me, a theme that holds together all the seemingly disparate chapters of my life. I believe my writing distills what is constant in me, allows something inside me that is beyond daily physical expression to cast its sparkling web of meaning. The first entry I wrote for diaryland ended with the statement �accept loss forever.� I want to let go of that kind of expression, for I am no longer there. My level of acceptance is such that it is a given, something on which I no longer need to concentrate. That sentence may forever be embedded in my soul�s whisperings, but it is such a soft whisper now I am willing to let it fade into the background.

I believe a person�s power lies in the present; the only parts of the past that affect her are the ones she allows to, the ones on which she concentrates. At any moment, any person can change into something wholly other than what she was. There may be some things I will want to remember always, but there are also some things I am happy to let go of to make room for something new.

�Aureliano had never been more lucid in any act of his life as when he forgot about his dead ones and the pain of his dead ones and nailed up the doors and windows again with Fernanda�s crossed boards so as not to be disturbed by the temptations of the world, for he knew then that his fate was written in Melquiades� parchments. He found them intact among the prehistoric plants and steaming puddles and luminous insects that had removed all trace of man�s passage on earth from the room�� �Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

(To anyone who reads my words, feel free to e-mail me. And of course, old friends are welcome to reintroduce themselves. Hello again.)

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