The Words Are Gone
I've decided to write, each day (or as close to that as I can get) about my favorite thing - be it experience, sighting, practice, fleeting, surprise, person, pain or joy - of the day.
This all came about as I considered what kind of blog I would write, if indeed I were to really start writing a blog again. I've had a few, but the most momentious detailed 12 years of my life when I traveled through and lived in Central America.
I discovered just a few days ago, that that blog is finally no longer hosted online. Anywhere. It's a parallel-universe kind of experience, this blog. My husband - he is no longer legally or in any other way my husband, but he is also not ex. That implies an erasing of the relationship, of the husbandness that he swam in. He is what he is to me now, and that is altogether different. But I digress. My husband-of-a-different-part-of-my-life has kept up the domain to the blog for the five years since we broke up and stopped writing it.
This blog contained hundreds of thousands of words telling the story of my life on the road and living in a foreign country for most of my young adult years. Knowing it was out there in the ether gave me a sense of security, a sense that it all really happened, and I could go back to that world any time I wanted. It helped me when I would get this vertigo feeling and it all seemed so long ago and so far away, out of my reach of memory, out of my reach of reality, or not even real at all. When my current self is so very far from the 24-year-old self who married her best friend (for both wise and silly reasons); who quit her very-good-and-in-her-field job after one year; who helped build an off-road vehicle to drive around the middle of nowhere - when my current self is so very far from that other self, that blog served as an anchor, it helped when there was no more husband to anchor all that past to and it made. all. of. it. real. It helped me remember that I can do anything, anything at all, that I put my mind - scratch that - heart to. And most of all it reminded me that even though I often felt crazy during those years, that those years happened, and they were - especially the year of magical travel - very very real.
But my tangible anchor, the words, oh the words, so many beautiful, frustrated, delighted, tired, annoyed, amazed words, are gone. And for five years I kept thinking I should print them all out, hundreds of pages, hours of work, and I would think: they'll always be there. Steve will always host them.
Which leads me to my favorite thing of my day today, this simple Wednesday in the middle of the week, an otherwise normal day. Steve: my husband of years before, beautiful photographer, funny and fantastic writer, capable of greatness in everything you did: you are free. You no longer have to carry the weight, make us whole. You no longer have to hold the other end of the see saw, the rope, so I can make sure it all happened, so I can feel secure and confident that we really did those things. I can hold the space for everything I remember, and for everything I don't. I can hold the space for all those missing words. You don't have to keep them for us anymore.
This all came about as I considered what kind of blog I would write, if indeed I were to really start writing a blog again. I've had a few, but the most momentious detailed 12 years of my life when I traveled through and lived in Central America.
I discovered just a few days ago, that that blog is finally no longer hosted online. Anywhere. It's a parallel-universe kind of experience, this blog. My husband - he is no longer legally or in any other way my husband, but he is also not ex. That implies an erasing of the relationship, of the husbandness that he swam in. He is what he is to me now, and that is altogether different. But I digress. My husband-of-a-different-part-of-my-life has kept up the domain to the blog for the five years since we broke up and stopped writing it.
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| Road to Raxruha. Copyright Steve Broyles circa 2001 |
But my tangible anchor, the words, oh the words, so many beautiful, frustrated, delighted, tired, annoyed, amazed words, are gone. And for five years I kept thinking I should print them all out, hundreds of pages, hours of work, and I would think: they'll always be there. Steve will always host them.
Which leads me to my favorite thing of my day today, this simple Wednesday in the middle of the week, an otherwise normal day. Steve: my husband of years before, beautiful photographer, funny and fantastic writer, capable of greatness in everything you did: you are free. You no longer have to carry the weight, make us whole. You no longer have to hold the other end of the see saw, the rope, so I can make sure it all happened, so I can feel secure and confident that we really did those things. I can hold the space for everything I remember, and for everything I don't. I can hold the space for all those missing words. You don't have to keep them for us anymore.
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