Rose Tinted
Dear Friend,
Things have been almost-okay lately. There's been some stuff that I won't bore you with for the sake of brevity but i had a really interesting series of thoughts lately spurred on by a lot of introspection.
I find myself having way more time than I usually have nowadays, and to keep from collapsing into a black hole I've been randomly scrolling through anything scrollable. One of those things is old Facebook messages.
I barely use Facebook nowadays-- only to talk to my siblings and nothing more, really. However, that also means that my message history has become kind of a time capsule for all my past messages and stuff through the years. The particular thread that caught my interest tonight was the one I had from us-- from me and her. From before it "got bad", I guess.
I've been thinking a lot about those times-- not necessarily in a "trying to get over it" or "listlessly pining for the past" kind of way, but moreso in the vein of athletes reviewing their footage to critique themselves. I mean, I've been trying to do better with how I communicate so what's a better learning device than a past self that I'm far enough detached from that I don't recognize? Anyways....
I was scrolling back through and found an old video of me and my niece, which prompted more digging to try and find some more cute nostalgic stuff, and I came across the messages we had exchanged when I was forced to use an Internet based messenger to communicate overseas. This was during the time I was in the Philippines for my brother's wedding so suffice to say I was distracted. Hoping that was the main reason why I sucked at active listening, I continued to trudge backwards in time.
What I found wasn't really all that bad, but by God I wonder how we had gotten along so well through messaging, or rather how I was able to maintain any sort of relationship, considering how much I obviously lacked from a back-and-forth writing perspective. Not saying that I behaved altogether interested, but by golly I seem like such a bore. I understand now why she had yearned for me to actually write something for her back then.
I guess it's some cruel irony that I take more care and time to craft written thoughts about her now that we're so far removed from each other's lives than I feel like I ever did while we were in a relationship.
At the risk of sounding like I'm being any bit revisionist, I'd like to reiterate that, big picture-wise, I wasn't horrible, but seeing now the guy that she had chosen to stick with, I wonder why he seemed so disinterested at times, and how we were able to maintain ties for so long with that. In some way I feel bad about it, but I also gotta be at least a little bit thankful. Without that dumbass's message history, I certainly wouldn't have such robust study material.
I dunno, maybe I've just kinda been on a wave of taking the piss out of my past self but I wonder now in what ways me from 5 years from now will look back on the me of today and cringe. I hope that I am doing enough to mitigate that but I guess the only truly objective opinion I can trust is that of a second-hand observer.
Strange though, that regardless of my former me's obviously lacking skills, I still got the impression that he very much loved and was in love. Maybe my perspective is colored a bit by the degree to which I still view those times as the "good 'ole days", but I've been doing a lot of coming to terms with the reality that you never fully appreciate the "good times" til they pass.
The train is most beautiful and tragic as it leaves the station. The scenery-- scents and smells, while losing their vivaciousness, gain what they've lost in sheer impact; only in retrospect.
I've been grappling with quite a degree of melancholy lately and it feels good to spill my words onto some virtual paper for the first time in a while.
I guess that the thought I'll leave off with is that even though she had that version of me that sucked so badly at writing anything close to the embodiment or breadth of his inner dialogue, she still believed that I had it in me to be a writer-- throwaway comments or not.
Only now, having been briefly published and no longer having her by my side, do I really appreciate a past that is as gorgeous as it is deceiving.
Rose-tinted.
I hope this letter finds you well
Your friend,
Regi














