Spring Forward

Time is a funny thing. Springtime breathes new life again. The birds are chirping. The trees are bloating. The leaves are brightening. People are opening their windows. People are alive. Losing that extra hour arouses life anew and propels us forward.

Some people live their whole life looking back. Memories can be sweet and memories can be painful. Sometimes the painful ones eventually turn sweet. But only because of time.

Some memories are neither painful nor sweet - they are stepping stones along the way to Me (or You). It is those memories to learn from and to spring from. They do not linger in any real sense - but only abstractly. Hopefully, they make you a better person.

Some people become bogged down by their memories. And use them as excuses - to not move forward. It stews. I have been guilty of this. I spent six years "with" someone who I knew would never committ emotionally. I rather liked it this way. I thought, "I can't get hurt this way." Because I had been devastated by an old relationship that didn't work out and I didn't want to get too close again. So after that hurt, I found someone with the same fear of getting too close. Together, we stayed - for the friendship, for the attention, and for the understood wall that neither of us was ever going to penetrate. I was hiding behind it. He'd break it down and I'd bust through ocassionally, but we always went back to our respective corners. We understood our place.

Throughout the six years, I did try going out with others. But I always looked for flaws immediately and never gave anybody a chance to get to know me. I always ran back to the arms of Him, knowing that there would never be any pressure. Never any chance to mess up a good thing because it wasn't a "good thing". Most certainly, never any chance of loving each other the way two people should love each other - tenderly, undoubtedly, and unconditionally. And passionately, because there really wasn't any passion come to think of it. In any case, I call it my Chasing Claude complex. (Modeled after a character in a book by Nancy Lehman, Lives of the Saints.) Chasing Claude is a collision course for disaster. It proved to be. I eventually crashed and burned.

See, that was no wall. That was a fucking barbed-wire fence - somewhat penatrable and very prickly.

And so you learn. I am not Chasing Claude anymore. I'm not dwelling on what could have been. It is what it is. And I am better for it. The memory of him isn't painful. It isn't sweet. It just is. It is shaping a new Me.

The new Me called up one of those guys I never gave a fair chance and, surprisingly, he agreed to meet me for drinks. I also have agreed to go out on a date with a friend of a friend. The Match thing is starting to pick up again too. Who knows? But I do know, I will be open-minded and not bogged down by past mistakes that never amounted to anything more than a fleeting memory now.

I happily turned that clock forward last weekend. Who needs an extra hour of sleep anway? There are shrubs to be hedged!