and so i called her. i called her and the rapid but thorough speech i had planned stumbled coming out of the gate. the pace, of course, was necessitated by the fact that i was fairly certain that she would hang up . . . best case scenario was that she would accept my apology with a quiet resignation and then hang up. but things are rarely ever as we plan and really, i think, i should have known this.

this is the way it sometimes is, i guess. I go backwards and through myself to avoid certain truths, and in the end, force my eyelids open until it burns. and perhaps allowing ten years to elapse before i made that effort was too much, too long, or too late. So there was the initial apology, and later there were more although we didn't talk about what for. For now and possibly for longer, we can only ever afford to acknowledge the edge of things from the past. Generalities are safer . . . the past is often even more harsh and, somewhat fortunately, even more ill-fitting in the light of present day.

as we talked, i had an odd sense of being suspended between two times, of simultaneously being two people - the person she knew, the person i now look back and know myself to have been and then the person i am today. i know that i love her and that i was at one time mostly in love with her but ten years - at least these ten years - is a lifetime of definition. and while i recognize that on some level, maybe many levels, she must have been redefined as well, it still felt like talking to the past.

and suddenly it occurred to me that i've outgrown her. and i can't stop contemplating the precise effects of that. she was further along in life's journey when our paths originally crossed, her definition more firmly set and although i recognize that the periphery may have changed, the core of her seems to have remained and i see and hear that core, i see and hear her now through older, altered senses. through eyes and ears and mind that she doesn't know, couldn't know because my definition only really began forming after her.

and although i know that i will never erase her from my mind, my memories, my thoughts, myself because sometimes when i close my eyes, it's her image that burns the back of my eyes - it's an image missing its pedastal. not because it never should have had one but because the vision that sees her now, the heart that hears her words, would never have placed one there to begin with and although i have no idea the level of interaction that we will have in the future, i'm at least free-er of her past . . . and mine.

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