Of course it’s me - and by admitting this I shun a lie I wanted to say, that I’d changed so, so much over this past decade or so… but I didn’t, not really. I’m still the same idiot who started this blog on an incident laden evening in Geneva, I’m still the same dolt who wrote here while I pined away for a couple of years more for a love that had been lost, and I’m still the same cacophony of a human being that last wrote here in 2013, when I was having a recurring dream, a month or so after the love of my life chose not to stay. How have I changed? Nothing since then changed me. Not one book, not one song, not one person I was with. I can’t remember the faces of people who were in my life during that time period, but I can recall the hotel room in Geneva, where I sat that evening, wondering what to do. I thought - right then and there I thought - that our story had finally ran its course. Had I known there was still a year of pain and misery on the horizon, would I have continued? How bittersweet to wish for lost time to be returned, but not to me. Never to me.
And I ponder now, and not for the first time, if every step that I took after that night in Geneva was always bound to get me to her arms. To finally know what home feels like. To love, and to want no more than that love, and then to not know it again. And if I could go back, would I take the same steps, tread the same paths? I know the answers to these questions. I’ve always known and I will always know, and that renders this exercise a futility in and of itself. I live in a moment of endless looped time that can’t be broken if not by the most impossible of things.
There’s something I well and truly hate doing, which is re-reading what I’ve written. I’m rarely ashamed of whatever by something I’ve written in the past, but I’m not a huge fan. This here blog contains a number of my most pretentious pieces of all time, and I know just who I was trying to impress. I don’t do that anymore, thank god for that, so maybe in that respect I changed a bit. I’ve started re-reading this blog, and god alone know how I resist the temptation to just delete or unpublish some stuff here. But I’ve done that far too often in the past - I’ve deleted entire blogs I once had and no record of what I wrote there still exists. But thanks to the Wayback Machine, I've actually found some indexed pages of the first iteration of this blog. And sure - most of it is from twenty years ago, a little bit older even - but now, as I re-read it I can see (even more) clearly see that I wasn't just stupid in my lates 20's and early 30's. No, I was already broken and sad and tired and hurt, and that - in a sense - helps to explain where I was at the time and why I ended up doing the things I did. And had I not done them, then the person I was when I started this new version of the blog would have never existed and (very likely) I'd never have written here again. It was pain that drove me here then, this shapeless thing that wounded me to my very core, and it was pain - yet again, that old, familiar foe - that kept me from writing here for many a year. It's not pain that lured me here now.
No, we've become old friends, and though it will (just) occasionally remind me of its potency, I have learned to take its whips and scorns in stride. Am I the same person? Yes and No. I'm less than I was, for sure. And sometimes - sometimes, but not always - I miss irreplaceable parts of me. Versions of me. But they're better left in the past, and that's a lesson I ought to have learned by now, but alas : I am still in the same place I was back in June 2013.
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