Nothing haunts a person quite like the past—it has a certain resonance, you know? It finds me wherever I am,whispering from a box on my shelf,buzzing from an old electronic journal, ringing and echoing down the caverns of time and memory like a phone call vaguely remembered but earnestly felt. It sneaks up on me in the dark when I am hard at work being who I am now and forsaking—with supposed good reason—who I used to be. It comes to me in my dreams when I'm simply trying to muster up enough of whatever it is that keeps me going day to day; it announces itself like a princess, but, unlike Cinderella, refuses to leave. Uncanny. It is late nights when I remember an old friend who I know I no longer know and who no longer knows me—a friend with which I vowed a friendship for life. Oh, how these vows fall by the wayside when it is so much easier to forget. “Who I am now is not congruent with who I was.” This is never enough. It takes a certain courage to open communications again, like using a
limb of old injury, like ripping off a scab and watching the blood ooze down to something we may still have in common.

I have lived long enough. Long enough to know that the past is a fickle illusion; long enough to know better than to expect to return to a person as if they are exempt from time and experience, as if the difference imagined is not unlike the difference achieved. It is sorrow to forget, and sorrow to know they have forgotten me.

How many people have I known and abandoned to time? How can I believe it won't happen again? Is all love doomed to such inconstant vanity?