Dear Past

Letters to Ghosts, part 3

Dear Past,

What a dance we have been in recently. Does it feel as strange to you as it does to me - to try to draw away from each other long enough to actually pen something to paper for you? It is like looking in the mirror and seeing both oneself and a stranger in the same place. It is like trying to peel back the layers of your own mind, but with that same mind.

You are me, Past. And so what can I say to you that is not some blend of what you are. Is not all that I am simply the sum of what is you? I look at all the scars and the fears and the laughter that shiver under the fragility of my own skin, and it is all just you. Is this not a thing that everyone is haunted by - they do not see the person in themselves that others do, only the insecure and broken child that has never grown beyond their school years.

Perhaps it is worth noting this about you, Past. You have this uncanny ability to reach your root system everywhere. You are not just haunting - that would imply that you come and go at times. No, we are all caught by your haggard appearance that stands at our elbow always; a kind of quiet devil whispering of what we have never been, and could never become. You are the hovering reminder of all the things left undone, and the things done that can never be taken back. You are the voice of shame, and the unshakeable cold sweat of embarrassment. Ah to be free of you in some moments.

But give it minutes (seconds, even), and you are everything that has been beautiful in my life too. You are the only substance left of the untradable moments of deep, real joy. Not the flashing kind, but the sort that comes roaring like a sunrise over the hills. How many of those moments only you and I know of; how many I would never be able to tell, even if I sat and tried. Those are you, too. To lose them would be to lose not just myself, but the very anchor of hope at what might be. You are the proof that there is more to be found - there must be. If I have seen glimpses of Heaven in you, does that not mean the full thing is out there somewhere? And so you are a harbinger of hope, too.

You are what I have lost, too. You are the presence of absence in my life. I say this (to some degree) with no emotional strings attached to it. It is not even that I hate you for it. It is that I hate to have lived long enough to know you in this regard. We need not be shy about it. I know that you will only consume more of me, like a parasite. A kind one, no doubt, but a parasite nonetheless. The days come and they go right into your open mouth, and you grow another inch. Or is it a change of shades, the way the water fades in winter to an opaque stillness? And I look at you every day, and I can see it all clearer and clearer: all that I was, and am no longer; all that I had hoped to be, but is now only a shifting reflection in that water; all that was planned, and is now sunk in the quiet of you.

I look at you, Past, and the seasickness of it all comes crawling up my back. I cannot look at you and not be tossed across all of it - the beauty and the sorrow and the stillness and the noise. It is all there. It really is a dance, isn’t it?

---

Truthfully, I thought writing to you would bring us to terms with one another - it is good to try and make peace with who one was and who one was not. But maybe such a thing is not the point of this at all. What would coming to terms with you even mean - do I intend to try and bury you under some pile of earth or beneath some eloquent and well-packaged writing?

No.

And I know why such a thing is not just pointless, but foolish. You, Past, are indeed me. But you are also more: you are all the substance of what I am yet to be. We ought not call this the Future quite yet. The things pre and post cocoon really are of a different nature, because a man cannot know where he is going. You are expressly not that. I am not so silly as to think that you will stay as you are, or that I will stay as I am now. Quite to the contrary, it will all change. All of it. Perhaps I will even look at you in a decade’s time (in a few years, even) and find that you are something entirely different.

You are not, though, a waste. And that is what I would have you know. You are not the discarded parts of my soul. You are not my shame. You are, rather, all that has brought me to this very moment - this very chance to look at my own self - and hold in my two hands the embers of my life, with all its sooty mess. You are the coals as they have come to me.

---

I would have you know, Past, that I am grateful for all the confusing heartbreak and beauty that you are. I do not say such a thing lightly. You are not a thing to be taken lightly. There are many that will not even be able to come close to you. They are keenly aware of how dangerous you are, and there is real wisdom in that. One does not toy with the ocean that can drown him, and you really can drown any man on any given day. But that does not mean that you cannot be thankful for that same ocean and all the sunrises and sunsets you see upon it.

So here is my ask of you, friend. Come close to me. Yes, even as you feed off of my own sunsetting life (and I say this with no sense of depression; we are all sunsetting for you, are we not?). Come near to my skin with all your noise and crustiness. I would have you remind me always of what I have been and where I have gone; what I have seen and stood through and been cut by. Why? Because you are the reminder I need. You are the standing memorial that all of it - whatever it might be - is not a thing to be wasted. It is to be held onto, not out of bitterness, but out of hope.

Yes, there it is. You are the noise of hope, and the material of patience, and the raw matter of faith. You are the clay - dirty and staining - that might be shaped, if only it were formed by hands that could do something with it. You are the currency of my great gamble: that all I have been might become something more than what I have been.

You are, Past, the offering I make upon the altar. It is, truthfully, quite the gamble, because to offer you up is to be willing to know you closely, and yet turn my eyes to something else - whatever that might be. There is nothing so terrifying as this. You are, after all, all that I have known. You are all that I have been.

But there is no other real way forward. Anything else - any other move than a real offering of you - is to be swallowed up completely by you. And Past, that is no way to deal with you. It is not that we are enemies, but I will not let you consume me whole. Come to me. Draw closer to me. But I cannot move towards you. Not one more inch.

I love you, my friend, my Past. Come dance with me. It will be something neither of us will know well, at least not when we start. But give it time. We have much to talk about as we dance. We have much to remember, even if the words are few and far between.

For You will light my lamp;
The Lord my God will enlighten my darkness.     -Ps 18:28