*
archive
*
random
*
profile
*
notes
*
*
diaryland
all these words, all these terms for the same disorder
15 August 2008 - 01:21
The strangest thing is that I am happy most of the time. Or at least calm, self-possessed. I have a will now, and will power. I am able to eat fruits and vegetables these days. Which is something I want to do because they are low in calories and high in nutrients. You can't eat too much broccoli; it's amazing. I have always had the same information -- I have always known basically how to be a healthy person; years ago something prevented me from acting on it, but today I can.
I can't stop thinking about how everything that has happened to me has made me who I am, but how I am not the same person to whom all those things happened. My memories no longer belong to me, but rather to preceding versions of me who eventually made choices that separated her from who she once was.
Someone asked me, God knows why, maybe it was I myself who posed the question, but I was asked:
Do you have any regrets?
No.
If you could go back in time as the person you are now and do it all again, would you?
Of course not. There is no way the person I am now could possibly make the same decisions. I would go back in time, if I could, and do all different stupid shit.
The truth is that I have only ever been home once, and home was lively and elaborately decorated, and I cried more there than I've cried in years. In fact, most of the time I lived there I had no idea how happy I was. I don't understand how a time period can feel awful when you're inside it and like utopia when you remember it. Was it that I was in love, the kind of in-love you only recognize years after it leaves you? Or is it because my memory beautifies with time? But it is not my memory.
The first time I saw a Noble Fir was on a night drive with Kale that went on hours longer than we intended. We were on Mount St. Helens for the first time together; we had no map; my hair was long. I saw the perfect, wintery silhouettes of hundreds of nobles against a dark overcast sky, and even though I was in the passenger seat of our van, I fell on my knees in worship. I had never imagined that trees so lovely could exist; they are not trees but archetypes or mathematical laws.
What bothers me is that I have never been able to love Mount St. Helens as much as when I had no idea what it was really like there.
And that applies to people, too.
And to life.
"It's impossible to want what I want in the shape that I want it, and share life with others besides."
--Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch