It was a frantic day, a day of a mad dash towards first-payroll-of-the-new-year deadline, and I had little time for breaks or lunch or even mooing. I had to make approximately fifty thousand phone calls during the day, and during the approximately 10 minutes I spent on hold for each of those phone calls, I would quickly click on Facebook or my email and click through a few things one-handed, a little mini break set to the elevator music of the speakerphone. An old camp friend found me and asked permission to view my page (which I granted,) and when I clicked on his page to see what he was up to I found a dozen or so people that I’d lost track of. I clicked on all of their links for permission to see their pages, and as the approvals came in I would zoom around and check out how their lives were. Digital reunion time! It can be fun.
The interesting thing about Facebook, and the internet in general, is that it provides ample opportunity for you to run into people that you had hoped never to see or hear from again.
Her comments pop up all over my old friends’ pages. She’s working here, she’s doing this, hey remember when we did so-and-so and wasn’t that super fun? She ruined an old life and old dream of mine, and there is absolutely no denying that it’s a very good thing that this happened, but I have not let go of my bitterness towards her. Why couldn’t she at least be fat or miserable? It would be easier on me if I didn’t stumble across her perky missives, but the world does not revolve around me and I care about these mutual friends of ours, so fine. OK. I don’t have the willpower not to read them when I see them, but I only let that old anger buoy for juuuuust a second, and then I turn my thoughts towards the beautiful life that is now mine, and remember that out of that ancient pain was borne my marriage, my child. Are there really things you just never get over, no matter how right they turned out to be? Maybe with maturity will come the ability to let go. For now, I still hold remembered pain of that loss of a life I don’t even want anymore a little too close to the heart. I can think of the old boyfriend now with a smile and a generous and genuine hope that his life is good, but it’s different for her. Because she never apologized? Because she is a woman, and we always bear the brunt of the blame? I don’t know. Both. Neither.
And him. He has a beautiful Italian love now, and a brand new son named, oddly enough, Patrick. I look at her smooth pretty face, her piles of gorgeous black hair, her tired body on the hospital bed where she stares with the motherlove at a scrunched up newborn bundle of tiny baby boy, and I fiercely hope that he does not beat her. That he got some kind of intervention for the abuse and the alcoholism, and some kind of good job, and that he will be a good dad. It is strange to look at pictures of that face, 7 years older now than the last time I saw it, and it is still the same face only without the hateful eyes, in these pictures at least. He hugs his woman, cradles his baby, looks at them with love and pride. I tried fruitlessly for way too long to change this guy, so I have little hope that change is possible, but for the pretty woman and her pretty baby’s sake, I fervently pray that it is.
Despite my illusions of distance I can’t really escape the old ghosts. They’re always hovering at my elbow, nestled in the curve of my ear. I am not a new person, as much as I want to be. I’m still within an inch of them all. Who have I hurt in this way? For whom is my smiling Facebook icon, a picture of Jack and me, a dagger to the heart?