Self Portrait at Thirty
I look back on that period of my life as if through a mist. For so long it was real, and then it wasn’t. I am hesitant to claim it, hesitant to hold it close and truly look at the damage. Sometimes things are better lost, unexplained, allowed to settle in some dark, quiet place where they cannot be disturbed. Occasionally, we will be drawn to the pale blue light they emit. Curious explorers of the past, we will dive to the bottom of that great, black ocean and bring something to the surface in the hope of better understanding ourselves. Some people might build a museum of those artifacts, but I cannot. Mostly, I find the pale blue light to be poisonous. It gets into my bones like a chill.
Something I have started to feel, after so many years, is compassion. I feel compassion for who I was then; for the things I had to look dead in the eye, for the fear I carried that I would not be able to save anything. I am so far away from that shipwreck now that I don’t even catch the scent of rust carried back to me through the salt air, but from time to time I feel the impulse to move slower, to notice the world, to revel in what is wholly mine because some piece of me remembers that it was not always like this.
I feel something deep in my chest, an inexplicable need to cry, even though I am thirty years old and I know better, because it’s in me like a bloodsong. I am sorry for what happened to me, and for not knowing what to do with it. Here, now, is the least I can do: I can feel compassion for what I left down there in the dark, even if I do not want to go back for it. I can find the language to name where it hurts. I can be child-like in my wonder of the world that has opened up before me, and I can learn to forgive this life for not giving me everything that I thought it should.
