Tori

[winterkoninkje]

It's funny how things can come back out at you after so long. I was just sitting there, wrapping things up to go play some games, when my randomizer throws over a decade away. Tori Amos, Indigo Girls, all these beautiful haunting women who filled those early years at college. The stupid years. Finally done with highschool, finally done with the drama (before realizing it isn't done with you), fleeing three thousand miles from an abusive family to find finally that life may be worth the living of it, and those three thousand miles sundering that first longest term relationship, the one when you somehow suddenly silently move from the weeks and months of teenage romance to years, but when years seem still unthinkable, before they've become the expected of adult romance.

"Gods, how did we survive being so young?" I want to ask, an incantation to break the spell, to separate again those memories from the living now and drive them back into "so long ago". I drown myself in reading up on Tori's latest work, a return to the personal, a return to the California of Little Earthquakes and to those two-decade old memories of earlier joys mixed with pains at CTY. As I listen to Plath, Tori intimates, insinuates, her recent moments of brushing up against that all-too-appropriate theme. And something about sitting at home now, alone but not lonely, comfortable against the winter's cold, reminds me of other dark moments, of christmas alone in a cheerful shared home. Our lives are bounded by the great movements, the segues from one phase of being into another, and that odd christmas happened to fall on just such a movement.

Right now, even as these old thoughts come back to me across the years, I am not at all depressed. Usually these scenes only return to me when that whirling deepness settles in again. We spend so much time trying to forget the bad parts of living, it's hard to express exactly what that feeling is when you can look on them clearly and yet not have them drag you down. It's been far less than that decade since I've been gripped in depression, but I do think that was the last time suicide crossed my path. It seems so strange, from here, from now, to think of all that's happened since then. As I get older I keep fearing that the time will slip away, that I'll wake up one day and wonder where it all went. And yet, when I break free from the illusion of the present, this last decade held so much more than the decade that came before. But I also know it's funny the way things can come back out at you after so long. When the boogey man comes he doesn't care about all the things you've learned, all the secrets of the universe unlocked, the identity unearthed from the ashes of childhood, the sexuality wrested from bigotry and hatred, the degrees earned or papers published, the friendships known, the people helped, or the stable happy home with that goddess who makes you smile every day.