The Past Can Wait

I'm in the process of clearing out the garage, ready for our move to France next month.
I don't, after all, want to pay for someone to move our junk from one land-mass to another. That would just be madness.

But sifting through, and trying to decide what's helpful and what's not can be tricky.
Or it was, until I came across a plastic red box full of stuff - memorabilia crammed in one place that maybe, just maybe, I may want to get nostalgiac about one day. It's amazing how such a gem can put other 'stuff' into perspective.

In this box, I found a bulging hard-bound orange-covered book of... something.
I opened it, and remembered...
I used to keep a diary. When I first went to college, over twenty years ago now, I kept a diary.

In that diary, I would write. And I would paste tickets and leaflets and programs from concerts or films I had seen.
I'd stick letters received from people I wrote to regularly.
A lot of letters. A lot of people. Some I had forgotten about.
Some, I hadn't even remembered I had kept in touch with.

It was disconcerting, as I flicked through to read occasional pages that caught my attention. It was as embarassing as I would have imagined in some places, the infantile talk of the sex-obsessed teenager.
And in others, it was poignant.

But the biggest impact?
I realised that many of the things from this time were not quite as I now remember. Time had merged many parts of that time into a general impression.

I thought my family had nothing to do with me by the time I got to college.
Not quite true.
There were letters from my Father and my Sister (and her very weird partner at that time) that I had forgotten about.
And letters to people I don't even remember being in touch with.
A girl called Dawn, for example, that I thought I had met only once.
It appears I had kept up correspondence with her for some time, maybe with the hope of something more.

And then the entries stopped.
I don't know why. Maybe it was around the time I met my now wife, and my life suddenly became very busy, very full, and with more meaning than before.
I didn't feel like I needed a diary, I think.

It's a shame. Because over 20 years later, I closed the orange hardbound diary of scrawlings from the past in a box, taped it up, ready to go to France, with one thought in my mind.

"What else in my life have I forgotten? Who else was important to me that I have reduced down to a single incident, a hook for how I perceive the history of events I once experienced?"

Boiled down, as I closed the garage door for the night: "Where did my life go - when all I have left is near-forgotten snatches of selected events"?

But that's ok. There's a future to look forwards to, and the now to get through.
The past can wait.

[ from August 2015 ]