Revision, 1997
- Feb 6, 2023
- 5 min read
It would appear I was wrong.
It would appear that I have a bit of new matter to be royally upset about. Like accidentally scratching the paint off of a wall and finding something personally profane and insulting beneath.
At least, I did issue the warning:
For a long time, I had pictured my personal history as a sort of mountain range, with my field of view from the peak of one mountain. Below me, fog hides the countryside, such that I can only see the mountain peaks behind me; atop each one, a bright beacon.
Do you want to think of Gondor's beacon fires? Go ahead. The thought occurred to me too, but that's not what it feels like in my mind.
One peak behind me, illuminating the memory of my kids on their adoption day, asking the judge if they could bang the gavel. A small cloud of ancillary memories related, hovering around, sparkling in the dark.
Two back: finding that we could not have kids.
Three: my wedding day.
Four, five, on and on back. Highlights of my life, lit bright against the dark, standing out above the fog of forgetfulness in between.
This was the framework my past is built around, my chronology of memory of past events as immutable as my chronology of scars was to my past harm.
The other day, I discovered my geography was incorrect.
With as much mental violence as an earthquake, suddenly I found an entire peak cast down and new ones upthrust.
It started, initially, with wanting to approach Tiana to explain some comments I'd made to her, about our past mutual acquaintance (and once friend) Winnie. It was, in fact, going to be very specifically about the breakdown of my friendship with her, and why I cut all ties.
It didn't go that way. Maybe I invoked the connection incorrectly, but: I brought up, very casually, some of the details of the relationship estrangement I had with Tiana when she went back off to school. Regarding her fluid life, and seeing others, etc. Because it was a fact, yes? Because it was something that I believed to be true, that I remembered.
"I never cheated on you."
Wait, what?
"When we were together, I never cheated on you. Yes, there was a part of that year that we had broken up, and during that time... but while we were together, I never cheated."
I... didn't remember having broken up. She clarified that this was pretty much the first half of 1997, up to her birthday and us getting back together, which was celebrated in part with our camping trip, wherein she had told me what happened in the interim. But I didn't say, aloud, that I remembered having broken up with her. Because I didn't.
This is when the cold chill of wrongness blew over me. It was like a malevolent hitchhiker suddenly being spotted, and needing to make a break for it.
"And what bothers me more is, why would she have told you I cheated on you?" She, in this case, was Winnie. "Because I didn't. Anything that happened while we were not together was told to her in confidence and was not her right to disclose."
Well, because that's the sort of person that Winnie was starting to turn into -- which ironically was the point that I was originally trying to make, so... success?
Conversation paraphrased; exact quotes aren't necessary.
This is when I started to Get It. Why I had so many memories that didn't quite fit the timeline I had come to believe happened, that I had to shoehorn into place. Like: rushing to see her in the hospital (technically, my friend Patrick had driven me) after having been in a car accident, even though we weren't together anymore. It didn't make sense as an isolated memory, so I'd shoved it into the first half of 1998 for some reason because that's when we were broken up -- even though that very literally couldn't have made any sense at all, because I was already dating my now-wife by then, and also because my new-anger after the events of 1997 wouldn't have permitted me to want to take that trip. But I couldn't figure out anywhere else to put it - so that was its home, as long as I didn't try to look at it too closely.
This was when I started to realize how pervasive and destructive my memory hole was. It wasn't just the events of October 1997. It splashed back and wrecked most of 1997 as a whole.
What I'd thought happened:
What I now see actually happened:
The salient point: she never cheated on me.
She. Never. Cheated.
The fuel for my rage: never needed to have existed
And Winnie was the spark.
I have a saying: I don't like wasting my personal energy on doing certain things -- like a grudge, or being angry -- if I can think of a better use for it.
Winnie is a very personal exception.
I collect friends, I like people being in my life. I rarely like losing them. But to date, I can count the number of people I counted once as friends, whom I've so utterly cut ties to and salted the earth of our relationships, on one hand. Winnie is one of them.
Winnie, as it turns out, was the sole source of misrepresenting to me exactly the details of 1997. Implying that anything that happened with Tiana in her own personal life, that happened while we were on a break, actually happened while we were still together.
Further, not only did she misrepresent when that happened, she basically revealed to me things that Tiana had told her in confidence -- as far as I can determine, specifically to sow discord between the two of us. Or something. I don't know and will never know because she is Order 66'd from my life.
But the fact stands: because Winnie decided to twist facts, and present them to me as truth, and edit the timeline of when things happened... for 25 years I was unfairly convinced that Tiana had cheated on me, leading to the immediate collapse of our relationship, to my memory holes, to my history of losing my mind and not trusting people....
Fuck you, Winnie. You were a good friend and you ruined and tainted me like you do everything you touch.
The irony of me talking about all of this, about things that should have been secret, and associating them with what happened in my life even pseudonymously, is not lost on me.
But I need to get it off my chest.
One person trusted incorrectly can ruin your entire life, and make you question pretty much every fucking damn thing.
I'm sorry for all the ill thoughts I had about you, Tiana, and the incorrect assumptions.
I like to say that I hate having my personal energy wasted on things that don't need it. I had 25 years of my personal energy wasted on a grudge that never should have existed.
And people wonder why my default mental mode is peppered with intrusive thoughts.
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