Editing Out the Exes
By: Riley Black
Tags: Relationships, Breakups, Healing, Love

I couldn’t see it then, but I set myself up for this. In any relationship I’ve been in, I’m the person who remembers. I keep and polish little moments — landscapes, smells, tastes, clothing, everything that might stick. That collection quickly turned into a tangled nest of nettles. I’m still stumbling into them.

By this point I’ve read enough mindfulness books to know that memories, by themselves, don’t have to hurt. I can simply let them pass. Fair enough. But sometimes being relaxed and pliant takes as much energy as resisting. I wonder if I should have moved to an entirely new place, or plunged so deeply into a new hobby that would give me little time for the past. And I know that’s just falling back on my go-to — how can I blame myself for this?

Perhaps I’m asking time to move faster than it can or ought to. As much as I love desert landscapes full of arches, bridges, hoodoos, and canyons, I clearly haven’t learned the patience of the rock. How many years it takes of freeze and thaw to carve a new landscape from the old. Perhaps I simply need to be patient and grateful that today doesn’t ache as bad as yesterday.

I certainly haven’t helped myself any. Writing from experience rarely makes friends. I didn’t so much burn bridges as rig them with dynamite. Maybe that’s as it should be. Maybe being “friends” would have been even more painful and kept those twisting memories even more vibrant. Nice? No. Yet if part of my lesson was to stop trying to appease, reassure, and flay myself for someone else’s benefit, options were few. I didn’t have an identity outside of “we.” Pushing the plunger and watching the explosions was as much about establishing myself, feeling my feet firm on the ground, as cutting off the past.

I can’t say that I wish all those sticky, thorny moments hadn’t happened. I acted in the moment. I acted in the belief that I was sharing something good today and that the feeling would be just that much stronger tomorrow. All the same, I wish I could box those memories up and put them somewhere to collect a nice coating of dust. Maybe a few cobwebs, too. A creaky attic where they could fade and decay a while, little more than tatters.

It could be that I’m making the problem for myself. Picking a scab can feel good, but it will leave a worse scar, and I still run my fingers over the damage as if to remind myself they’re still there.

I’m sure you can track the mixed metaphors by now. Erosion, rot, decay, dust. Transformation from one thing to another. The slow process of something alive becoming inert, or broken down into a new shape.

And, as is often the case, I’m probably wrong about all this.

Those memories are mine, too. They’re not objects I’ve kept in trust for someone else who now finds them worthless.

Hitting Reset on your life at 35 means that there’s far more that you wish to forget than you want to remember. And, after all, I’m a writer. It’s a writer’s privilege to draw the focus and narrow the story. If any scene or moment contained every detail —phase of the moon, air temperature, humidity, cloud cover, clothing, scents, the activity of the dust mites in eyebrows or bacteria in the gut— any given piece would be an unreadable stream of data. The story truly is in the telling. And if I wrote some people into my memories, I can also edit them out.