Just Write {76}

These sesame rice crackers taste different today. Yesterday I thought they were the best thing I’d ever tasted. Today they just kind of taste weird. Same crackers.

I chew ice, the kind that’s all blasted apart by an in-the-freezer ice maker. I don’t know how it makes ice and then you can push a button and it makes loud noises to give you bite-sized pieces, but I love it.

Chewing ice is a sign of anemia, did you know that? I mean, if you chew it addictively, like me. I’m anemic. Again. You’d think I would just keep taking the iron supplements all the time forever and ever amen, but I don’t. I stop. Then I want to go back in time to be more responsible about my diet and taking iron so I don’t have a hemoglobin count thingy of 9. But I can’t go back in time, obviously. That happens in books and movies, not here. Miles asks me why this is the case and I don’t really know. I suppose it’s because we already have so many choices, too many, and so adding “do you want to go back and do that again. yes or no” would only confuse us even more.

I talked to two different friends on the phone about this today. If given the chance, it’s not like we’d go back There or There, to fix this or do that over or start on a different path. To do that would mean erasing the now and no way. And yet, it’s hard to look back, sometimes, at that girl with no clue what she was doing and I want to hug her and tell her the right way to go and remind her that she is worth choosing the peaceful way; worthy of listening to her heart-gut and then doing the next right thing.

She had no idea.

My friend said that yes, we can let go because we look around at our lives and our loved ones and we would never wish them away, and no matter what was the original path laid out that we ignored a time or seven, it didn’t lead to here. Or maybe it did. Here came after a long detour. So now we are here and it is what it is and we are what we are and embrace it.

It is much easier for me to embrace these loves of my life than it is to embrace myself and to be okay with leaving behind the past that I should not have left behind. Some of it was not meant to be left behind.

This is hard to freely write because I can’t shake the feeling that it’s coming out wrong. I have no idea what I’m really even saying. It’s just on my mind lately. I keep having dreams of my past. These dreams haunt me. Real and vivid dreams that I wake from feeling like they really happened and then I’m not sure why my subconscious is so hell-bent on exhausting the same seasons of my life.

Reminds me of some Sara Groves lyrics. What I thought I wanted, and what I got instead leaves me broken and….grateful. 

Sometimes I’m very content and surrendered and peaceful and all that, and sometimes I feel a shadow following me. A Back Then shadow. It is not about wanting a different life or different people in my life. It’s about lives lived before that I grieve for reasons I’m not sure I understand. Chapters and seasons and doors and all of that. Closed. Done. Grieved.

You can be happy in your life, overall, and still grieve what has ended. There are parts of you back there, broken off and left on the ground with them, or him or him or her or them.

If they bent down to hold on to you, after you left, and they tucked that piece of you in their hearts, you grieve because you did the same and you both know it.

Miles is home from school now, out on the back patio with a rubber mallet. He’s breaking up the ice that’s all over the cement. He wanted to do this more than eating a snack or having screen time. It’s a mission he’s on, to break up all the ice everywhere. This is a mission that makes no sense to me, but he lifts the mallet over and over and slams it to the ground. It looks exhausting. And it hits me, that this is what my mind is trying to do while I sleep. Working through all of it, trying to clear the way. It leaves me with vivid dreams and memories. It leaves me looking at the missing pieces of me. I think I’m supposed to forgive myself for leaving them behind. For the most part, they’re in good hands (and hearts) anyway.

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This is the 76th installment of Just Write, an exercise in free writing your ordinary and extraordinary moments. {Please see the details here.} I would love to read your freely written words so join me and link up below. You can add the url of your post at any time. Just be sure it’s a link to your Just Write post, not to your main page, and please don’t link to posts that are not freely written in the spirit of capturing moments–you know, don’t link to how-to lists or sponsored posts. Also, please link back to this post in your post so people know where to go if they’d like to join in.

Please take a moment to visit someone else who has linked up! It’s a really good way to meet new writers and get inspired by the meaning behind their moments. Word? Thank you!

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