A recent comment made me wonder if I needed to explain something that I always thought wasn’t worth explaining.

To, ya know, the 5 people who read this.

Perhaps I need to explain myself:
I don’t write about other people. Not about exes, not about friends, not about enemies and coworkers. I don’t.
I write about me. I write about the world we live in and how I experience it.
But I do think about other people. About exes, about friends, about enemies and co workers. I think about the past. I think about context. I think about me and the world we live in and how I experience it and how that is so very tied to what I have experienced.

That does not mean I miss the past and it does not mean I resent it.
But do I live in the past?
Perhaps, maybe I do. But not how one might think.
I think most people understand, abstractly, that they are a collection of their experiences, and those experiences, as often as not include people.

I commented, recently, in a comment to this blog (which now, more than ever, seems pretty masturbatory) that you get over the love, but it is hard to unlearn the lesson. I continue to believe this to be true. Put more simply, you’ll carry the experience even if you forget the person.

And you’ll live in your brain no matter what continent you inhabit, and who you inhabit it with. And if you are me, that part of the brain has real estate. It has substance and topography and a whole host of guests and inhabitants. Some visit daily, some never leave, some show their face at the most inopportune times, and some I wish would come on by much more than they do. Some I cleave to know better as a analyze and replay, some I can’t look away from, like roadkill, like a hot mess. They are exes and friends and coworkers and maybe that person on the train I always pondered. They are people I grew to know well enough to get to know myself better.

Allegorical characters long after the fact.

You may not experience your past the same way. But you do experience it. Directly or indirectly, abstractly, or vividly and explicitly.

And maybe you process it through song, through dance, through psychotherapy or through drink.

Or maybe you have a blog.

Or maybe you don’t process it at all. Which is also worth pondering. And you don’t even want to know what I have to say about that.