Late last year, my divorce became final. Sometime this year, I finally got over it. Maybe.
When Tabbatha and I entered the "serious relationship" phase, she made it clear to me that my relationship with Sue, my ex, needed to be modified, if not eliminated altogether. I bristled at first; who is she to tell me who my friends are?
Not that I didn't understand her feelings, mind you. She felt, understandably, that since Sue and I spent so much time talking, I must still have feelings for her. Of course I have feelings, I told Tabbatha; she's my friend. No, she replied, not feelings of friendship. Feelings of...feelings. You're not over her. You're obsessed with her.
Yikes. Obsessed? Well, I admit I spend a lot of time pondering what might have been. But I do that with everything. I obsess over that girl I went out with once, who laughed at some joke I made. I obsess over that other girl who made a witty remark that suggested we had some common ground even though we never saw each other again. I obsess over every single woman I've ever known, and any person who's ever been nice to me. I obsess over stupid things I've said and done, things I wish I could take back. I obsess over whatever happened to the Johnny West action figure I had as a kid. I obsess over the idiot plot points in Star Trek IV. I obsess over whether that was really Spaulding Gray in Ilsa: Harem-Keeper Of The Oil Shieks. I obsess over what Phil Ochs and John Lennon and Peter Sellers would have done if they'd lived.
Clearly, things don't just pass me by. Everything matters to me, all my accumulated experiences dig in and fester or bloom or do whatever they will. Can I stop my feelings, can I hide them? Do I embrace them or abhor them? Or do I--somehow--try to let them go?
That's what I'm trying to do now, for Tabbatha's sake and for my own. It's nice to have a past, but when it intrudes on the here and now, perhaps it's time to...No, "let it go" is too trite a phrase, and not quite accurate. These are the events that have made up my life, after all. I don't want these things to go anywhere, to vanish like a random thought. They just need to matter less, to diminish like objects in a rearview mirror. The past is the farm where I spent my childhood, or the house where I lived much of my adult life--still there, but I live somewhere else now.
