ERNIE AND ERNESTINA: Searching

Book Two, Chapter 185: The River of My Past

It’s true that I’m coming to understand my life with Ernie — after that life is over.

But is the past ever really over? William Faulkner didn’t think so. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” he wrote in Requiem for a Nun.

Besides, what is the past? It’s not written in stone. As I change, my perspective on the past changes. It’s as fluid as I am.

I’m made up mostly of my past. The past is what’s made me who I am now. The future? I don’t think about the future. It becomes as I become.

Today, going down our building’s south staircase, I stop on a landing to look out at the rose garden. Suddenly I think: rose garden! The Secret Garden. That night with Ernie just outside the garden’s rustic door when we kissed for the first time. When that kiss meant the world to him.

Never before has this rose garden stirred a memory of that garden, that night, our kiss, but how could it not?

Because the person I was blocked my past.

Memory is like a river, and I'd dammed its flow. But no more. This writing is helping me find the river of my past. And dip into it.