It was a private comment but it did make me think about what other people might make of my journal. Being what I’m thinking about tonight, that train of thought becomes my entry and most of my entries are public.
I don’t live in the past, really. I don’t live there, but I am drawn back frequently. I believe that the foundation of who I am today is built upon the path I took to get here. Experience echoes back and forth through my life (perhaps everyone’s life, but I can only judge myself). The now triggers memories of the many thens, especially when I think slowly and deliberately as I do while writing, while recording and exploring my own thoughts and how they come to be.
I live today a quiet unexceptional life but there are so many improbable events that got me here. As a person alone, I am my only real witness, my only true judge and recorder. Having actually lost so much, of materials, yes, but more importantly, of memories, in the normal form of forgetting and the catastrophic form of losing all my journals before the storm, I do not begrudge myself the indulgence of taking a memory and putting it down in words, in as excruciatingly minute or blurringly broad detail as feels right as I write.
The past is the past, yes, but it does percolate through my head and pop up in the present whenever it will.
But now, the present is demanding my full attention in the form of an insistent tortoise-shell kitten. Esme is having a love-me-now attack. Climbing into my lap a few minutes ago, she forced herself against my chest in her usual manner, wanting to be cuddled and made much of. She rewards me now with a lovely deep thrum even though I have the nerve to keep typing with one tiring hand.
Enough journaling, living inside my head and sometimes my past. Real life, real now needs must be attended to in the form of an overly affectionate baby cat.
Oh-oh. Here comes Coco. Im definitely going to be out of free hands to type.
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