Time Isn't Poison

(but the past can be)

I got some IM's this morning, and they knocked me on my ass.

Your past is a funny thing. It's at once black-and-white - this happened, that happened, no two ways about it - and subjective, as your perception of why and how changes. As time goes on, events take on different levels of importance in your mind, have different meanings and different causes.
This graying of concrete facts is accelerated by my memory. As some may know, I liken my memory to a huge hallway with the walls endless dwarers of files that hold all my memories. Unfortunately, there's only one worker, and he's 84, has a cane, and is going senile. Whenever I'm trying to remember anything, he has to amble down to the right dwarer and find the right file. Unfortunately, since he's old, not only does it take a long time, he often gets the wrong file, or the wrong dwarer. So there I'll be, trying to remember the name of the band at a concert I attended a year ago, and I'll come up with, "The Pulsating Squids."
The point is that of all things to remember, events are one of the worst for me. With the rarest of exceptions - I can tell you individual seconds of my mother and my highway car crash and the bloody aftermath - events, important turning points of people's lives, of my life, vanish like mist in the morning sun. I happily remember taking Julie on our second year anniversary to the Grand Concourse. I remember her little chocolate cupcake she got and looking around at the train station. Why is this important? It's the only anniversary of the five I can remember. I don't remember what we did for our first, our third, our fourth. I just can't remember.
And these IM's got my old guy working overtime.

I've spent the whole morning feeling sick to my stomach. What I can remember of the events of years ago keeps replaying in my head. I sit at work and I can't concentrate, images of the past floating by, unbidden.
Betrayal. I've never really thought about it in such a blunt, harsh way, but that's what it was. I betrayed someone. A friend. The circumstances were complicated, I was in a difficult position, it was a tough decision either way... and that is all irrelevant. I know that now, aided because the past is a little clearer as it gets farther away. Regardless of the circumstances - the excuses - I was wrong. I held something beautiful in my hand. And while I didn't crush it, what I did was I took my hand away, and it fell to the floor and broke.
I thought that the pain would eventually subside, that I would learn to realize that it was a huge mistake and I would learn to live with it. Lord knows I learned from it. I changed because of that incident; the more I thought about it in later years, the more I realized what I did wrong and what I should have done. And it changed me. I am a better person because of the lessons I learned, probably because those lessons burned with the shame of my choices. So, tons of regret, but shouldn't I feel that at least I learned from it?
Not a chance. The magnitude of my mistake grows every year.
And its proven by the way my stomach is doing flip-flops now. One IM, bringing up the past that I never got close to putting away to begin with. How do you put something back together that was so intricate, so wonderful? What was there had been special. One-of-a-kind.
I miss those times.
So, this IM reads, do they.

I have had enough. I have spent years regretting my decision. I know now that I will never make it again. It may be impossible to totally fix what was there. Maybe it will be better. Maybe it won't. But what I had - what I threw away - was so wonderful, so great, that what memories I have left of that time deserve all my effort to recreating it. Successful or not. Second chance? Maybe not. But I'm damn well going to try.
My stomach butterflies just left.

If I wrote the emotions I felt now, I'd go on for hours.

You don't know what you got 'til its gone.