#difficult memories

[absolutelynocontent]

I've been trying to be happy for so long, but I think I've never stopped chasing the kind of happy I was when I was ages 13 to 15, when I found my first group of friends. I know it's time to put the past to rest, but I wish I could tell them I am sorry about how things turned out. I'll keep trying to figure it out.

[backwardsandinhighheels1945-blog]

Difficult Memories (Sam & Peggy) 4 September 2015

Whether or not the VA therapy group was strictly speaking the right place for Peggy to go with her problems was water under the bridge.  It had seemed like a good idea when she’d arrived.  She was a veteran who was still struggling with some of the issues she had developed during her time during the war and with what had happened to her while working with SHIELD since.  So much had happened in a short span of time.  Coming home.  Keeping her cover as a telephone operator with her friends who couldn’t know she was an agent.  Finding herself in a new time period where the dead had seemingly come back to life.  The identity crisis that had sent her halfway around the world away from everyone she knew and thought she’d loved.  And now here she was back where she’d started and trying to pull herself back together without support she’d had the first time.  

But the stories the others told were so different from hers.  Whereas her scars had disappeared when Peggy was given a new body these men and women wore their wounds.  She listened intently with the rest as a man recounted the story of losing a portion of his face to a grenade he hadn’t seen.  He looked like he’d had plastic surgery but Peggy had seen what men who served in the first war looked like under their masks.  He’d been through quite an ordeal even with the surgery.  Faces were too hard to get quite right.

When a man spoke about his trouble loving and understanding his children Peggy felt for him.  She knew first hand what it was to come home and see how nothing had changed and just how painful that could be.  While she was home on leave her mother had chided her for how rough her hands had gotten and how muscular her arms were from the heavy lifting in her job.  Her sister had complained that she couldn’t find lipstick or stockings and Peggy hadn’t understood why they thought such things mattered during a war.  

Before she knew it the session was over and she hadn’t said a single word beyond the odd mutter of agreement in the right moments.  Mr. Wilson called the meeting to a close with the reminder that what they were feeling wasn’t unique and that they all understood what the others were going through.  Maybe she ought to have spoken.  It seemed almost a shake to have come so far and only listen.  But what others had said had indeed helped ease her state of mind.  That was half a blessing in and of itself.  Deep in thought she spent a little longer than she maybe ought to have in collecting her purse and keys.

[beccaplaying]

Memory

Weird thoughts watching The Office finale, thinking of someone I once watched it with on a little DVD player in a hotel room. I think we watched Booze Cruise, because I loved that episode and he let me choose. Amazing that The Office is just now ending, because that night seems like a lifetime ago. Life moves in weird and unexpected directions. I never could have guessed that night how things would turn out in the end.