I had some old tapes from high school transferred to DVD's since I had lost the camcorder for them and hadn't watched them in over a decade. I knew it was going to be something weird and intriguing to watch them. But I wasn't really prepared for the deep silence it would bring to my insides. Turning the first DVD on and seeing my 16 year old self was quite the humbling experience. This "calm before the storm" feeling echoed in my bones. Instantly I softened as I watched this very young, very loud and very bossy version of myself parade on screen with so much confidence it made me blush.
I wanted her calm down. To take just one second and think about the choices we were going to end up making. But she clearly could not hear me. The loud karaoke style sing alongs that was painfully blaring through my speakers had overpowered rational thought. The giggling of 3 teenage girls alone in their bedroom making fun of themselves on camera and loving every moment of it was all that mattered.
My first love was on their too. Kelsey. Exactly how I remembered him. Young and completely unavailable. He may have been my boyfriend, and my first you know ,and we may have said and I love you, and yes he even briefly lived with me, but no one was ever farther away. His mind was always somewhere else. But there he was. In my kitchen on Northland. With Danny and Chris and Ian. After The Snowball Dance in March of 2003. Drinking and laughing and kissing my cheek. It was surreal and bittersweet. And the kind of closure I didn't know I still needed.
I have lived countless lifetimes already. Millions of moments and emotion and energy folded into people that I don't know anymore.
It's like the movie Arrival. If you haven't seen it, sorry spoiler alert. It has to do with how we perceive time. We humans see time has linear, a straight line from point A to B. But it doesn't have to be perceived that way. In Arrival, The female lead sees her future before it technically happens, and although it's very bittersweet future, she chooses it anyway. Because the experiences she is going to have outweigh the sadness that comes with the loss she will have in her life. Even now I'm fighting back tears thinking about how beautiful that is. And I am trying to see my life as such. Even though things in my life may not have gone how I wanted them to, they were priceless in what I learned and how I grew as a person. And even though "you" may not be in my life anymore (I have a lot of "you's" out there) I want you to know that I wouldn't change our past, no matter how bad or brief it was. Because the experiences I've had are the only things in this world that are truly mine.