Divorce buried my memories

When you divorce you lose a future.

But I discovered something else.

You lose your past as well.

The past held in memories.

Memories. The currency of the past, the unseen bill that gets spent in the dividing of the assets.

Places in your head you can’t go anymore, places in your life too painful to revisit.

All sorts of memories:

That bathroom.

That tree you had to cut down in the backyard.

The evenings the girls danced in the front room.

The shy little daughter biting her dress at the back of the Christmas party.

But these memories haven’t been stolen from you.

They’ve been segregated for your protection.

A flaming sword rises to stop you re-entering.

I forgot I even lived in that red brick house. I forgot about that back room, that bookcase.

I forgot the colour of the walls in the front room.

But I saw a video of my daughters dancing today, aged 2 and 5.

And it overwhelmed me. The happiness.

I saw the room, the fireplace, the sofa, that table to set drinks on, the Wii remote lying by the television.

It all came back.

These memories started to appear on my iPad home screen and on my phone.. an Apple update was now presenting my life back to me, back through the invisible wall.

Sneaking past the fiery guardians, trickling over the mental dam.

And I let those photos prod at me like a psychiatrist poking inside my past.

Memories of the deceased are precious.

Memories of the divorced are precarious.

The mind registers the moment and something primal makes you move on quickly.

Do Not Enter.

Swipe goes the flaming sword.

Until now I was used to seeing photographs once in a blue moon. They popped up from time to time when I was looking for something else.

But with this Apple update they stare at you on screens you stare at too many times a day. They are not pictures on the wall you forget are there… they change by the hour, constantly drawing your attention. Randomly presenting memories you’d forgotten. Memories that can cause pain.

At first it was overwhelming.

To the point of tears.

Family members that are not family members anymore. They still exist. They appear in these memories – in the time they were family.

Still reachable but forever distant. An invisible wall of social distancing.

Or friends that drift to one or the other.

Not to ‘sides’. There was no war.

But just the inevitable choices that change the direction of our lives.

Maybe the lockdown made me nostalgic.

But seeing these photos… I pushed back tears on a daily basis.

That holiday.

That dress.

That joke.

The thing you’d like to talk about has no ear to hear anymore.

The stare-able no longer share-able.

But,

In all the stream of moments, they are there.

I see the constant smiling faces of my daughters – hilarious and happy.

Yes happy.

There WAS happiness.

Of course there was.

That’s part of the grieving still.

The pain now is part of the happiness then.

As C S Lewis said about losing his wife.

——

An image presented itself forcibly in my mind the first time I experienced the affection of someone else.

It was a few years after.

In this image I could see inside my arteries, down into my heart. Their edges were covered in hard, black, charred, scabbed lines, attached to the inside of the flesh.

And I could see, and feel, warm oil being poured down through the flesh. It was agonising. It began to dissolve behind the dark cracks and tear at them. The wounds began to break off.

Healing through tearing. Healing through painful dissolving.

It was agony, beautiful agony.

The first stage of healing was to my own heart. That I could be loved again.

This new stage, facing up to photographs, was a healing of the mind.

Healing the road back into memories.

Allowing me to begin to restore them, to peel away, not without pain, the barriers that stopped me enjoying them.

To let the flaming sword be lowered.

They began to release the oil to let me ease back into thirteen years of life. To remember that they happened.

Life is not long enough to be able to swipe over a whole portion of your days.

The memories need brought inside again, reconciled, viewed, cried over, bathed in healing oils and tear-filled smiles.

Forgetting is too easy.

Forgetting is impossible.

Forgetting is bad for you.

Not to look away in sadness.

Remembering is hard.

Reforging is possible.

Restoring is good for me.

To look.

To smile.

To appreciate.