Ladybugs and Stones

This blog may make more sense if you read the one directly below it (The Malicious Ice: Revisited). I tried to keep it light today, but alas, heavier things bubbled up once again.

It’s actually something of a miracle that John and I have become good friends. We parted on terms of quasi alienation but thanks to the modern miracle known as email, we’ve found a medium that is rather conducive to building a friendship. That and of course the blog. He once said “I learned more about you from reading that damn blog for twenty minutes than I did from living with you for a year.”

John and I did have a falling out of sorts, of which the specificities need to not be, well, specified. But that was then and this is now. It was an easy relationship to repair, although not all wrinkles are so easily ironed out. Why is it that some problems are like ladybugs that with a bit of forgiveness spread their wings and happily fly away, while others are solemn stones, made immobile with pain that won’t dissipate?

For example: Sarah says that she has forgiven me for the rotten way I treated her but we both know she can never forget the person I used to be. She knows I’ve changed and how much my heart breaks because of everything that happened, but the past is concrete, not dissolved by mere apologies, and recurs an infinite number of times. Neither of us can forget the past, and in the process of replaying it over and over in our minds, it grows like vines around our hearts. While the future is shapeless, uncertain, and without weight, the past is definitive, formed into a protuberant mass, and the heaviest of burdens.

There is little to do but accept the fact that sometimes you will always be seen not as whom you are, but as the shadow of the person you used to be. The past becomes like the sun, a swirling mixture of irrevocable incidents that permanently cast an inescapable shadow.

If every second of our lives recurs an infinite number of times, we are nailed to eternity as Jesus Christ was nailed to the cross.
-Kundera