Untitled

I did it.  I took the dagger lurking in the shadows of my past and I stabbed myself with it.  I wasn’t pansy about it either - I thrust the jagged rusty edge of the blade straight through my heart that had been locked in a vice grip for the last two years.  The warm, sticky blood turned red as rage as it slowly exited my body; I felt a sense of relief as the dizzying sensations pierced my lucidity and the life began to drain me.  Allow me further explain.

Tonight, I began to pack up my life to move to a new city.  I am moving into a house with two other graduate students that I hardly know, and to be honest I’m ecstatic.  I just bought myself a new car, I’m moving out, I’m making dents in my loans, I got promoted again…and everything just feels like it’s on track.  I’m pushing myself and growing and learning and living and I couldn’t be happier.  But there was one thing that I hadn’t really tackled.

In the recesses of our Harry Potter bedroom (the closet underneath the stairs) lied an aggregate of boxes that I had not-so-neatly tucked away.  They contained my life that I had single-handedly packed up and moved from college to the comforts of home at the inception of the marked degradation of my 4-year relationship with my ex, Ashley.  The breakup wasn’t fun.  Most aren’t, but after the 4-year marker, it’s an anxiety that you’ve come to drop, and so it was an unwelcome stranger on my doorstep the minute it arrived.  It was rough, and the best way I knew how to cope with some things was just by not dealing with them.  And so the boxes came to live underneath my staircase for the past 2 years, until this joyful evening when I barraged through them prior to moving.  

I knew what was lying in those boxes - not necessarily the specifics, but the emotions thinly veiled between my current life and my past by small walls of corrugated cardboard.  What I didn’t really expect to come out of the boxes was all of the good memories.  When a relationship dies, you tend to hold onto the fights, the bad qualities, the reasons why it didn’t work and why you weren’t right for each other.  The good memories waft away in the same way that your childhood memories become glazed with the haze of old age.  But I was pulling out dog dishes from when we bought puppies together.  Photos from us when I was 18.  Strands of hair (literally).  One of the nicest/best/most thoughtful letters I think that anyone ever has & ever will write me.  DVD copies of TV series that we posted up and spent countless hours watching cuddled up underneath a blanket with.  Even scents that I associated strongly with memories and time periods (anyone who knows me knows that I am extremely good [and also sensitive] to smells).  It was all pretty unexpected.

I’m at a place now where I no longer really care.  I don’t want that relationship back, ever.  We were young, naïve, and way too immature to commit & ask of each other what we wanted back then.  I didn’t know myself as a person yet, and who knows, maybe she didn’t either.  It’s whatever.  But I guess I finally had to go through that one final wash of memories to finally let that chapter of my life die, be sealed up, and done with.  It kinda hurt, it kinda made my smile, but all of that stuff is gone, permanently tucked away or trashed, and not one piece of my old life is moving with me.  It’s beyond exciting to start completely fresh, in a new city, with nothing but happiness in my current life.  I am actually to the point where I’m so enamored with my new life that I could talk for days on the subject matter.  But I really am happy, and excited, and proud that I was able to put myself through that pain to let my old self completely die…and tomorrow marks the day of my rebirth (DOES THIS MEAN WE CAN CELEBRATE MY BDAY 6 WEEKS EARLY?!?!).  LEGGO.