Memories can play tricks on you…

People are like history really – events that have happened in the past are rarely as you remember them. The mind plays tricks on you, recollections get coloured by where and who you are at the time of recollection. Sometimes you’ll even create false memories of the past, so well that even you can’t remember the truth. That can be deliberate for any amount of reasons I guess, but it can be subconcious too – protecting yourself from things.

 

Have had one of those moments this morning.

 

Hard to explain without going into ridiculous and boring detail. Will try though. At the age of 16, I fell hugely in love for the first and only time with a girl i was at college with. Was my first relationship and hit the magic ‘L’ word on the first attempt. Was very deep, serious and meaningful and talk of engagement and marriage after 9 months or so was quite genuine.

 

Anyway, my then-stepdad (turned out to be a sh*t – a story for another day) had an enormous stroke 10 months in while she was away and I, quite simply, couldn’t cope with the pressure of trying to support Mum through it. Within a week or so I developed an inability to cope with pressure or stress, and started clubbing a lot and hanging out with new people to switch off – a near-total character reversal. Also found it hard to open up suddenly and had gone near ‘numb’ feeling-wise (yes, i know – in retrospect the OCD/anxiety disorder similarities are strikingly similar but this was a long, long time ago).

 

Suffice to say the girl in question and me had big problems with this change in me and while trying to work through it, combined with the influence of her father (who hated someone being so close to ‘his little girl’) and her insanely jealous, nasty best friend, we had some rocky moments. She became insecure and had people spying on me which led to me finishijng it once (would never have cheated, ever) – we got back together after her kissing someone infront of me at a party in order to get at me. Nice. After a while, she then admitted to having done the same thing again with someone else while drunk – an unpleasant piece of violent, drug-taking work who was friends with her best friend – I stayed with her (yeah i know, but I loved the girl) but couldn’t clear those images out of my head of her and him.

 

It eventually got too much and, one day before Xmas Eve late on an evening, something snapped in me. i walked up to a phone box and finished it. A week later I broke down, realising how much i missed her and couldn’t cope. She jumped into bed with aforementioned nasty fella. We had 9 months of incidents after that until it got too much – I cut off to save my sanity after being lied to again.

 

Yes it still hurts – stupid really I know. Not so much over her in particular (I’m a very different person now) but more over the whole thing I guess, and having lost something like that feeling never to refind it. *shrug* But you get used to it and deal.

 

This morning though, something ‘clicked’ into place. I was never able to remember properly what happened the day i finally finished with her. has always been a hazy series of recollections with the odd moment of clarity and, I guess mentally, i was in such a bad and screwed-up place back then that its understandable. But I do remember earlier that day I’d gone out to speak to a friend as I was considering things with said girl. I could never remember those hours properly. I couldn’t remember WHY i’d gone to speak to the friend. And I guess it says something about me and the guilt need complex I have that somewhere my mind had constructed a framework where I’d gone up there having already decided to finish with my gf, and intended to ask out my female friend before doing so.

 

Yet this memory never sat true with me – never sounded right. This morning, whilst watching a TV prog, it suddenly clicked into focus. The memory was a fiction.

 

Yes, i did go up  to see my friend – BUT I can now remember that I was up there to speak to her about my gf because I was so confused and mixed up, and wanted to get some advice because I didn’t know what to do and knew the things I was considering. I can’t remember whether she was in or not, nor whetehr we spoke – but I can now remember walking home thinking ‘give it another night to sleep on it’, then getting home and brooding on it for hours, eventually winding myself up into the mess that saw me finish things.

 

There was never a romantic subtext in it – I think I can see why my mind constructed it (months and months later, me and said friend did become close and I’d have liked something to happen but it never did), but it’s weird. It’s as though that bit of that day was ‘locked out’ from my conscious memory and my subconscious tried to reconstruct it from other related bits, but got it all mixed up.

 

Sorry folks – this is a pretty boring, irrelevant entry about something long ago, i know. But to me it’s been something my mind has kept returning to at random moments to torture me about, and hurt and frustrated me because I knew i wasn’t remembering things properly but didn’t remember thr truth. Remembering it is a big thing to me – maybe I can forgive myself just a little.