never brought to mind

I finally made it back to Portland (the one in Maine) after our little holiday adventure. Christmas is for family; New Year's is for me. It's fuck-off cold outside and I didn't pack my best winter gear, but it's only about a mile from the train station to my house so I figured, you know, fuck it, I'll walk.

I've always liked walking. It's peaceful, and everything looks so different when you actually have time to look at it. And tonight it reminds me of a New Year's Eve many years ago when it was just about as cold as this, and I was just as under-dressed. I had youth and absinthe to fortify me against the cold. Both, I suppose, were gradually wearing off as I walked (the latter rather quicker than the former).

Everything seemed so much clearer back then, and not just because I was drunk on wormwood and hopelessly in love with a girl I'd known for about a month and felt like I already knew intimately. (It turned out, of course, she wasn't into girls. C'est la vie.) Even stone cold sober there was this sense of progress, this sense that anything was possible. There was a lot of bullshit out there, of course, but it was exactly like the cold: so long as we kept moving forward, it didn't matter. We stopped moving forward, of course, and when I got back to the house I was living in at the time the hot water was broken and it was still cold inside, and I wrapped myself in all the blankets I owned and a couple coats for good measure and huddled in bed and dreamed of warmer times.

So tonight as I walk home I'm wondering what the girl I was back then would have thought of today. I know she'd be horrified, but what would she think, looking forward? What would she think of me? Would she hate me for giving up, for hiding from the world? Would she think I'm foolish that even after everything this past few years have thrown at me and at the world I'm still allowing myself that sense of hope? Did we have anything in common besides living in the same body at different times, walking back home in the bitter cold, pretending it's not getting to us?

It's so easy to neglect the people we've been. And, yeah, past-me was insufferable and idiotic at times. But every now and then, when I take the time to reflect on auld lang syne, she startles me with some insight that I'd since forgotten. There's so much more to her than heartache and regret and failed hopes.