Yesterday
There's been an organic breakfast food ad fluttering about the net, and the jist of it is all the super feasts women perform first thing in the morning project from the reel. One: something like 25 percent of us check email before even getting out of bed. I--if you didn't guess--am one of those women. So, a little after 8 am yesterday--as I didn't have a full cup of coffee in me yet nor was I out of bed--my hazy eyes and comfortable body found a jolting start. On a day working from home, the lack of commute usually means a few more articles to lazily read and a moment to dick around online. Hence, when I got an alert someone tagged me in a photo on Facebook I didn't think twice about it.
Until I opened it.
Did I tell you this was at 8 am, well slightly after?
Between the lack of coffee and such when I opened the link I was certainly taken aback. I had forgotten it was even a "day." Then . . . then I saw a photo of me and a friend clowning around at my wedding reception. The photo might be funny, but . . .
When I wrote, "I try to forget about all of that." I meant it. My response, while appearing to be the high road, was really more of shock. I mean, why? Why would I want to be reminded of the tie for greatest mistake of my life? These are things I will never understand . . . especially the pandering to a sense of low-brow comedy and all things yesterday.
Yea, like I've mentioned here and in interviews around the web, I might long for my Clearly Canadian beverages, plaid skirts, Nirvana, and Oasis just like the next Gen Xer... Yet, there is a limit of things I will dredge up to roll around memory lane in. Running through a day of life's drudgery in Sunflower perfume: sure. Finding a buffalo plaid, in pink, baby doll dress to wear: not on your life. Digging up an old Daisy Duke style red and white gingham off the shoulder shirt (that I actually made)? Not a shot in hell with a free passport.
That being said, that day I wore that off white, beaded dress . . . that is yesterday. A yesterday of the metaphorical and literal sense, and well I am not that person anymore . . . For a moment I believed in a Cinderella dream, yet like 99 percent of my life it did not come true. Moreover, the dream was riddled with unstable fault lines before it really began, and it crumbled more than a year ago. Life moved on, like it always does, and he won the break up.
I have a quasi travel piece making the rounds of review, prob due out this summer, about the power of a night away and the residual echo of things lost. There is a sense of loss of innocence as we progress through life, yet the loss of dignity is one that doesn't always stand so starkly in the door. Did shades of dignity fade when I walked on that pier in that dress? Did they fade when I filed divorce papers? How I found out things were done? What he has said and done then, during our marriage, and since? Or was it when seemingly old friends found themselves more comical and important than realizing not all memories--no matter how funny at the time--need to be publically held up to the spectrum of remembrance? Somehow, I think that answer is mixed in with all those. Though, underneath it all, slippery eel personality elements of self grandisement and vindicitive cruelty certainly emerge from the smoky layers.
Yet, the power of yesterday lets us remember throwback thursday on Instagram with comical ease . . . even me, in a melancholy state of betrayal, posted one today. Today's meander: a dress and jacket you can barely see in an old pic from a 110 camera . . . circa 1999 in Las Cruces, NM. And an even younger me in 1996 in Santa Fe. Those were the first time I danced with blonde shades.
Until I opened it.
Did I tell you this was at 8 am, well slightly after?
Between the lack of coffee and such when I opened the link I was certainly taken aback. I had forgotten it was even a "day." Then . . . then I saw a photo of me and a friend clowning around at my wedding reception. The photo might be funny, but . . .
When I wrote, "I try to forget about all of that." I meant it. My response, while appearing to be the high road, was really more of shock. I mean, why? Why would I want to be reminded of the tie for greatest mistake of my life? These are things I will never understand . . . especially the pandering to a sense of low-brow comedy and all things yesterday.
Yea, like I've mentioned here and in interviews around the web, I might long for my Clearly Canadian beverages, plaid skirts, Nirvana, and Oasis just like the next Gen Xer... Yet, there is a limit of things I will dredge up to roll around memory lane in. Running through a day of life's drudgery in Sunflower perfume: sure. Finding a buffalo plaid, in pink, baby doll dress to wear: not on your life. Digging up an old Daisy Duke style red and white gingham off the shoulder shirt (that I actually made)? Not a shot in hell with a free passport.
That being said, that day I wore that off white, beaded dress . . . that is yesterday. A yesterday of the metaphorical and literal sense, and well I am not that person anymore . . . For a moment I believed in a Cinderella dream, yet like 99 percent of my life it did not come true. Moreover, the dream was riddled with unstable fault lines before it really began, and it crumbled more than a year ago. Life moved on, like it always does, and he won the break up.
I have a quasi travel piece making the rounds of review, prob due out this summer, about the power of a night away and the residual echo of things lost. There is a sense of loss of innocence as we progress through life, yet the loss of dignity is one that doesn't always stand so starkly in the door. Did shades of dignity fade when I walked on that pier in that dress? Did they fade when I filed divorce papers? How I found out things were done? What he has said and done then, during our marriage, and since? Or was it when seemingly old friends found themselves more comical and important than realizing not all memories--no matter how funny at the time--need to be publically held up to the spectrum of remembrance? Somehow, I think that answer is mixed in with all those. Though, underneath it all, slippery eel personality elements of self grandisement and vindicitive cruelty certainly emerge from the smoky layers.
Yet, the power of yesterday lets us remember throwback thursday on Instagram with comical ease . . . even me, in a melancholy state of betrayal, posted one today. Today's meander: a dress and jacket you can barely see in an old pic from a 110 camera . . . circa 1999 in Las Cruces, NM. And an even younger me in 1996 in Santa Fe. Those were the first time I danced with blonde shades.
Thus, those notes of yesterday linger on. I haven't smoked in years, yet today I'm longing for a gingered pull on a Marlboro Light. Why? The billows of that smoke, the momentary (yet unhealthy) escape as one pulls the nicotine in, and the self loathing and love all mixed into a singular cigarette (as perverse as that all sounds) would serve to ease that memory--actually the new one made--of things gone by and things wished forgotten. Instead, there's some apple tea from half a world away lingering in my cup sliding the passage of time closer to the woman I am now than that woman I was then, or even yesterday when my soul wasn't waking in the shock of friends not lovers.
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