10 years older.

This was an exercise for my latest writing class.  The Facebook 10 year photo exercise caused me to reflect on this piece.

You find yourself on a park bench on the South Platte. Beside you sits a young person you gradually realize is in fact yourself, but ten years ago. For some strange reason, both of you feel more calm than you'd expected to feel. What transpires between you?

We’re both here because we love water.  Water brings us peace. Life isn’t always peaceful for us, now or then.  Life is better now, yes. Life is more or less the same now, yes. Life is harder somehow now, yes.  Life is so much easier now, absolutely. All of the above.

I don’t want to tell her everything about the now or the parts of the journey that she’ll avoid if she knows they’re coming.  She has had too much trauma already. She’s already running scared. She doesn’t need my advice. Yet, she asks. She’s a persistent one.  Full of questions, a frenetic energy, a terrorized exhaustion lurking behind her eyes. Her shoes are beautiful, but uncomfortable, and she looks at our feet in shock that, even though we’re on a riverbank, I seem to have given up and now we wear things that are more function than form. She still wears high heels to show houses in rattlesnake country.  

She has no idea how much more comfortable we are now.  In our dress, in our shoes, in our being. She thinks she’s finally free of the trauma, the drama of a marriage that was disgusting, disrespectful, disappointing.  She does not know of the traumas to come and, because I am a protector, I want to protect her and am angry that in knowing my deep-seeded desire to protect others I want to shake her and tell her to wake up and simply protect herself.  Protect us!  But with that protection comes a lack of the experiences we need to have in order to arrive at our comfortable shoe wearing present.  So I am still and I just listen.

She is most worried about the kids. She is unsure of herself and her decision to leave.  She is broke and broken. I smile, a knowing smile full of pride, and simply say, “You’ll see. They’ll be fine. You’ll be fine.”  She wants to believe me, but I know she does not. She sees Tori’s angst and Connor’s anger. She is filled with rage for our Peter Pan ex-husband. I do tell her that the rage will abate.  That the annoyance will fade. That there will be days soon, and then weeks, and then months that she won’t even think of him. She will forget the sound of his voice. She will only occasionally think of the hurtful words. She will forget the names of the other women. She will make more money than he ever could. I call him “Husband 1.0”.  She asks if “Husband 2.0” is better.

I laugh.  If only she knew.  And she will. In just a few years.  If I told her about our marriage, our trials and tribulations, she’d never help that client buy a house, never fill out that Match.com profile, never get drunk with the client we now call “Cupid” and agree to go on a blind date with his co-worker.  She’d continue with the self-deprecating humor of her self-inflicted blind dating tales. She’d continue dating rodeo clowns, drunk drivers, accountants, and would continue getting stood up by alligator hunters and doctors. She’d miss so much.

Because if I told her about how she would spend two days searching, first the house and then the streets, for Husband 2.0, thinking he had drank himself to death or found a way to do himself in even faster, she would run.  If I told her about the tens of thousands of dollars she would spend on his rehab, she would run. If I told her she’d actually have to deal with her past traumas as a part of her own recovery, she’d run. Instead I simply tell her that we’ve found a partner, a true support system, who fits us well, loves us deeply, challenges us sometimes, we love him in an intense, mature, passionate way. That he is good to our kids.  And, that he’s tall. That’s all she cares about anyway.

She asks about friends and I don’t have the heart to tell her that her next ten years will see her lose her best friend to differences, political and otherwise, and that friends don’t last long when you’re not drinking. I remind her that friends are fluid and seasonal.  We’ve lost a best friend before due to being in different spaces in our lives. She simply nods and we both remember a memory. She likely wonders what I mean and who she’s about to lose. I won’t tell her. Again, selfishly. Though the friendship ended, I still needed the friend for the journey and she didn’t need to go away any earlier.  

I can tell that she’s disappointed that we’re still not thin, in fact we’re likely heavier than ever.  I tell her that I’m working on our health from the top down. Right now I’m doing more deep-trauma work than deep-knee bends.  Right now I know that all the deep-knee bends in the world won’t help. She doesn’t know that we can’t do deep knee bends anymore.  I want to tell her about that one. I think that the butterfly effect of a non-torn ACL can’t be too terrible and I wouldn’t mind if that physical pain didn’t exist.  

And that little piece of advice snowballs in my head from “Don’t shuffle step to your right at Tori’s basketball tournament pretending you’re defending sixth graders” to “Don’t stay working for a misogynist.”  to “Don’t take that drink from a stranger at the bar.” to “Don’t let that guy know where you live”, to “Lie to get off of the  jury and you’ll never see a decapitated body.”...and then I stop myself before I speak and I say nothing.  Not saying something is a skill I’m only recently mastering. She seems surprised by this.  I am surprised by this. The chronic pain of my knee is nothing compared to the pain of imagining that anything in my life had turned out differently than what I currently have.  Even with the traumas, I’d do it all again the same way.

Neither of us envy the other.  I would no more want to rewind time ten years than I would want to drop another hammer on my foot.  She wants to hold onto her thirties because her twenties were not hers. She cannot imagine her forties. I can see our fifties knocking on the door.  She lost herself in our first marriage. She will find herself during, and independent of, our second. Based on my outfit of sweatpants and a college t-shirt she likely thinks that we’re still broke and depressed. Or, she thinks the kids are going to Duke.  She doesn’t know it’s just a comfortable sweatshirt that reminds you of Anne, that financially we’re just fine, and for the first time since we were teenagers, we’ve got our anxiety and depression under control.

I often wished, when I was her, to have someone just tell me how it would all turn out. To know is to plan, to prepare, to control.  To control, to prepare, to plan, is to manipulate. Manipulation is fun for us. She has no idea how fast time is about to fly. I tell her to enjoy the little moments but  I will not tell her what little moments are for fear that if I speak them aloud they will not happen for me. And even though she is me, I am selfish in my old age. I want those memories for myself.  She can have them in ten years.