looking back, moving on

last weekend something possessed me to label all my old entries into a series of vague usually useless categories no one else will ever use.

i think my OCD tendencies played no small part (my co-workers have begun to notice i clean my desk every night before i leave and systematically tap the desktop while composing important emails). but more than that, i was in the mood for a little retrospective.

suddenly i catch myself so completely enraptured this life. a life that i never imagined or could possibly have thought was mine not so very long ago. little moments where he tucks me into bed as he gets up so no drafts get in. or as i quickly sign off on my taxi account in the back of a cab, late for a board meeting. or when i tell him i love him and know that i mean it. fleeting moments of some other pretend life. like scenes from a movie or more appropriately, some other twenty-something with a job and a partner and none of the things i ever really considered to be part of my reality.

from the outside it seems so unlike me, so impossible to be here, that when i suddenly see it, the shock is overwhelming. and it never completely disappears. or it hasn't yet anyway. i do realize 5 months isn't really a forever by any means. frankly i have my doubts about me and forever too. but i guess that's part of my point. when i am suddenly jerked out of this misty haze of contentment and day-to-day and see myself from a distance being comfortable with a hand on mine and giving presentations without my tell-tale right knee quiver, I see someone else and wonder how I got here. How i can still feel and be me and yet have grown into something I never could have dreamed for myself.

i guess it's that i've so quickly become accustomed to a life wholly unconnected with what came before in so many ways. that i already take it for granted when only six months ago i was the same, but everything else was different. and that necessitates admitting i have no idea where the next six months will lead.

so, in this oddly worrisome and yet entirely unburdened mood, i wanted to look back on how i got here. as if seeing my moody scratches would give me a retrospective map of my path to her and now. to shed some light on what has become an utterly unbelievable journey.

suffice to say, i didn't tell me anything i didn't already know. i did grimace and wonder at the things i used to say and feel about him and me. i am still uncomfortable with our awkward past i guess, but better at now and trying to undo the things i did then. it's a miracle we happened the way we did i think, but somehow i am not surprised i did that backwards too.

and it's easy to see how desperately unhappy i was at my old job, as it slowly ate into me and my tone. and worrisome how the content changed from friends and escpapdes to a chornology of coupledom and ranting. and a relief to see the trickling away of wild desperate adventures just screaming out. clutching at need. and doubt.

i don't have any reason to be writing this. you don't care gentle reader. frankly, whether you read them or not, it's all still the rubbish in my head at the end of the day.

i guess suddenly the newness of it all struck me this morning. timely, what with my first valentines just past and our birthdays both next week. i'm marking time, noting change and assessing. like always, i overanalyze. the content may change, but the system stays in tact.