In a virtual sense. More contemplation on Canada*.
One of the noteable things about nights and, indeed, the days after nights is that I’m tired and I spend more time than normal in a slightly less than positive mood contemplating things. Not out-right negative, but tired and slightly low. The tiredness takes the edge off happiness, somehow.
I tend to counter this with lots of loud music and smiling (‘cos your brain can’t tell the difference and feels happier).
Anyway, one of the interesting things that occurs to me is the distance between me and my past. Most people have links to their past. Often close links. For long and complex reasons I’m not likely to go into here, an event in my past made a lot of what happened to me seem in my childhood seem like it happened to a different person.
And I suppose it did, in many ways. The person I was then and the person I am now have very little in common. It’s not like a whole separate person distinction, there’s a connection there, but it’s tenuous and weak; like melting strands of cheese, between me now and my memories of me then.
And each step I take in my life takes me further from me then. But the things that have happened to me, then, now, they very much make up the person I am. Experience made me who I am, so however far distant I may feel to a somewhat unhappy past, the pain of my dad’s death, and however happy I am now, when I’m tired the strands of the past sometimes wrap around me and I find myself looking back.
What interests me is how impossibly hard I seem to be to link to my old life. I’ve changed so much, and so far separated myself from me then, that with the exception of the links I’ve deliberately maintained (one friend, one person who found me) there’s almost nothing that links me to that childhood past. And I’m slowly moving on from my dad. I know I’ll never be free of the sadness of him dying, because he meant so much to me, and he’ll never see how happy I am now – because when I came out he supported me – and talked to my mum to help her come to terms with it all.
It seems strange to consider that in a year’s time I’ll be living in a new country, with many new people around me, a new job, a new life. But there won’t be a new me there. There’ll be the me with those fragile, insubstantial links to a life lived in another place and time.
* Interruption to thought process: It’s amazing how bad the acoustics of a Morris Minor at 70mph are. There’s entire instruments on The Ting Ting’s album I’d not noticed were there.
