You Have A Memory On Facebook

I wrote this several years ago when I was going through something that hit me like a Mack Truck. My first husband had recently died and my nest was empty. I was in the process of re-inventing myself and a Friend Request on Facebook literally rocked my world. For almost a year I took a powder. Pouf and I didn’t even know who I was. Once I’d been loyal and honest and felt that I had a decent amount of integrity. And the next, I was falling down a rabbit hole that didn’t have a rope.

Through a lot of work I found my way back but I am not proud of who I became for a while. The Friend request was from someone who’d destroyed my confidence when I was a teenager. The relationship was subtly abusive and hard to describe other than that of a frog sitting in tepid water, who finds himself smack in a pot of boiling water. The getting out and getting over it and the memories almost did me in.

Today I read… YOU HAVE MEMORIES ON FACEBOOK…. It was the post below. I’d written it before too many followed my blog. It was safe. We were all strangers. I am writing a book about my journey. Of abuse, of reconnection, of second chances to say everything you ever wanted to… Like I said, I am not proud of my choices but I don’t regret them because they made me who I am today. Someone who appreciates today and has stopped looking back.

The Post was titled;

YOU CAN’T LOSE SOMETHING YOU NEVER HAD

You remind me of the ocean, the smell of the waves, the scent of summer, of heartache, of endings… of beginnings… of engagements and breaking up, of learning for the first time how to put aside dreams and learn how to survive the pain of heartbreak, you gave me my very first broken heart, you remind me of a never ending love that has weaved it’s way through the decades that have passed, the place in my heart that still hurts if you touch it, you are the reflection of my youth and my hopes and sorrows.

You taught me how to love and were the keeper of my tears. You challenged me and you suffocated me. You believed in me, maybe more than anyone ever has and yet you smothered me, snuffed out all the confidence in me. I sailed boats with you and flew planes!  I mean “I” actually FLEW a plane without an engine because of you! When you believed in me. I believed in me! I discovered that I could do things that I never would have thought of doing, if it had not been for you. Oh how you took me to the top of the world and then, oh but then… you dropped me and oh how I crashed. And even today, I’m not sure that I ever recovered. Maybe that is why I let you back in, to go back and get pieces of me.
You loved me and you hurt me over and over again, you left me found me over a lifetime of hellos and goodbyes, I loved you and I hated you, and yet I forgave you , fantasy and reality cloud into one, I see so clearly and am blinded at the same time, I understand because I know your pain and yet I can’t overlook my own, I give up everything for you and  escape with my life, I never look back and remember it all, I am safe when I am falling, I am silent when I am calling, I lose my soul and find it again, i pray for forgiveness, I believe and I doubt, I fail and I succeed, I dream and then I look back and remember, I laugh and I cry all in the same breath, I dance in my head and ache in my heart, I grasp at my youth and cling to my wisdom, I crumble where I am and gather the lessons I have learned, I turn around and find you, I let go over and over again, I sing from the mountain tops inside the silence of my imagination, my heart is stopped, I thought that I could change things, somehow fit you in to that place you left so long ago and yet the space has been filled, maybe not perfectly but slowly, I think that as I fill it with new dreams around the healing wounds, I might still have a chance at surviving this whole crazy place that I have found myself in, I take a breath as  I fall on my face and pray for strength to stop the madness.. and feel my heart begin beating again. And finally realize that …..

Someday I want my book that I am ripping apart once again, to give hope to the broken hearted and strength to those that haven’t even reckoned with their own strength yet!