Souvenirs of Love
I was randomly thinking today.. reminiscing actually about something one of my ex-es used to say. Well, I mean this guy was my first real boyfriend and the first out of the 2 people, I have ever truly fallen in love with. And this guy was to me at the time a perfect mix of rational-understanding and creative-romantic there could ever be. That and his deep blue/green-ish eyes made it all come together. :)
Well tracking back to the the topic, he also used to say (well, he actually wrote it in a blog post many years ago), that we take a “piece” of each other when we chose to leave a relationship and that no matter the terms of the divergence of ways, there is always this one specific thing about the other person that sticks with you, like a “souvenir” that you put in your mental box of scraps. Kinda like when you’re a kid. And then you open this box many years later and you find each object and you’re reminded of specifically what it is and who it is about.
And yeah, of course it made me think about what I ever put in this box both good and bad as a souvenir from everyone in my life. It obviously brought up a mix of crap and melancholic stuff gathered through experiences with people along the years.
I mean looking back I’ve had quite a few fucked up “relationships” in the past and have been involved with some shady AF guys, but somehow each one of them showed me a side of them that brought a lesson and a teaching that I’d keep for life.
In any case this “ocean-eyes” boy has been a stepping stone of kindness, culture and deep emotional expression for me. And the souvenir I left with is, as stupid as it sounds, him opening me up with a sense of security and faith and trust that still comes rare to me. Our first interaction, metaphorically, was when I smoked weed for the first time in my second year of college and he guided me to an eclectic and a deeper experience than the random stupid shit the rest of the group was doing and talking about. He has always been that for me: a warm taking-of-the-hand and gently showing me something or somewhere I would have otherwise not seen.
Now, guys, this was about 10 years ago, I may have fallen out of the love I had for him back then, but I keep the soft-warm feeling of who he was when he showed me those things.
In any case, the spiral-down from his “souvenirs” blog post, took me to some other much older “college” blog posts I had in a different space on the internet, and I see my own teenage souvenirs there. It’s like I left them for myself.
I find myself in there as some broken pieces of some sort of material that was eventually used to have it mold together and give birth to this new and improved shape. (Yeah, we don’t believe in Chinese habits of glueing broken vases with gold, we believe in remixing the material into a completely new shape around here :) ). Now I think ‘Wow that was a completely different person’ in each distinct period. I was certainly much more lost and hurt, and emotionally unstable back then (teen angst I guess they call it haha), but I still hold a piece of each of those “people” I used to be.
