The rain spills down the window pane. The house across the street is shrouded in thick, white fog. The silence is broken momentarily by the soft clinking sound of a wind chime. I can’t see it but the soft, matte tinkling noises make me picture forks and knives and wire whisks dangling from the neighbor’s porch beam, swaying and dripping in the mist.
It has only been a month since I moved out of my parents’ house. I move forward from moment to moment with a momentary purpose that blots out the light of the past. I am aware very acutely that the past has not relinquished its hold on me. It sits behind my eyes and my heart like water behind a dam, huge and deep and powerful. I know I need this past from years of trying to leave it behind. I am not afraid of needing it or having it on my own terms. I am afraid of what it needs from me and I am afraid of not being able to say no to its demands. That I don’t know what its demands are only makes my dread worse.
I look down at the chemistry book in my lap at my future. I feel instinctively that if I create a future that is bigger and more powerful than my past then I can face where I’ve come from without fear. If I just move forward long enough, deny the past long enough to build a fortress out of the future then the past won’t be able to hurt me anymore. Something tells me that this amounts to hubris, that stories don’t work that way, that the two sides of the equation don’t equal out. Something tells me that the demands of the past must be met. But, I tell myself in answer to this, there is nothing that limits me to how this can be done. And I am determined to do it on my own terms or not at all.
