As if the things that irritate us lasted.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come.

I horde things. I pack them away in boxes, store them in attics, hide them under beds, and treasure them in my heart. I’m an afficianado of personal memorabilia. I must have the best, for only the best will do. Among the treasures most valuable to me are the many letters I have kept over the years: postcards, holiday greetings, announcements, letters of love, and letters of brokenheartedness. Being that we now live in a digital age, on top of my collection of letters, I’ve horded away a much larger collection of emails. Since Hotmail archiving sucks, and used to suck much more, and it’s the email client that I used, this unfortunately only goes back to around June of 2001. Even so, I printed out most of the important emails from before that, and put them with the letters.

Every once in awhile, and fairly often when I’m feeling introspective, I’ll shuffle through these artifacts and try to repiece the memories of past loves, triumphs, and failures. I have every written correspondence between Margaret and I (the printed emails) from India to France. I have Prairie’s letters of the Summer of 1995, from Colville to Port Townsend. Perhaps most poignant of all, I have the letters that Amanda Stevenson wrote me as she was bouncing around the country looking at colleges. She wrote letters that were works of art, and if I were to publish an autobiography I would include them solely on the merit of literary perfection. Her last letter, hurt and angry and confused (and rightly so, unfortunately), contained a sticker sheet of gold stars (“for my achievements”) and a condemnation so pure and powerful that it actually changed my life. Almost exactly six years later, and I still feel my stomach churn when I think of how I acted then. I’m slightly comforted in the fact that though I absolutely acted stupidly, I never acted maliciously.

Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations.

Sometimes I pore over the emails between Emily and I, trying to find the crisis point; trying to recreate an entire relationship through the brief thoughts we would send each other day after day. I don’t do this with regret, though nor can I claim that I examine them with any sort of detatched intellectual curiosity. All of it, in the end, is in the hope of personal salvation; the idea that if I put my failures under the microscope, I will be able to see how they came to be, avoid the same mistakes in the future. And even here while I call these moments “failures”, like some mad scientist trying to create life, the word feels false. Perhaps they weren’t my best moments, and they certainly aren’t my happiest memories, but who is to say that the end of a relationship might not be a triumph? Certainly, leaving Ohio was one of the best things I ever did, which isn’t to say that moving there was bad, but that enough was enough. I don’t know if I could have lasted another year there, sane.

Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

The past is a blur filled with brief moments of stark clarity: that night by the river with Prairie and Cree; waterfights in the summer in front of Jamie’s grandparent’s house; Monday, 1st period, getting pulled out of Biology class by Sara completely unaware that the world was about to give me the first of many lessons in “fuck you”; sitting on Kas’s roof singing “semi-charmed life”, and the walk that followed; the night, too nervous to sit, when Amanda and I listened to bull frogs and counted shooting stars; all of the various dances Margaret and I went to, and many of the nights of tears that I tried so hard to understand; the day Emily drove away in the back seat of a rented car; our early, failed games of chess, and the day I drove away and felt more liberated than bereaved. Perhaps, as a whole, I’ll never understand my past. I’d settle for understanding those few moments that seemed so lucid that they couldn’t have happened any other way. I’d settle for really, truly understanding any one of them. And it’s terrifying and exciting to think of a future as full of these moments as the last ten years have been. Will time slow down as the years go by? Will those clear moments of the past fade away as the new ones occur less and less frequently, until finally I look back on my life and see only a blur of faces and events, none distinct from the others?

So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

Honestly, I don’t worry much about the future. I tend to think a lot about the past, though, trying to find answers and insights into who I am. The problem with looking into myself in this way is that I don’t know if I looking at who I am or who I was, or where the two might merge. Every once in awhile, though, these musings lead to a cathartic sort of revelation, sometimes loud and sometimes subtle, that takes a strange weight off my mind, and for a moment makes my heart feel whole. And for these moments, it’s all worth it. Because the things that irritate us don’t last, but those few, clear glimpses of beauty in this world, those last forever.

Keep in mind how fast things pass by and are gone — those that are now, and those to come. Existence flows past us like a river: the “what” is in constant flux, the “why” has a thousand variations. Nothing is stable, not even what’s right here. The infinity of past and future gapes before us — a chasm whose depths we cannot see.

So it would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.

-Marcus Aurelius