Running Through the Past to Renewal
When I lost my relationship of more than 28 years, I also lost the extraordinary complicity of shared memories that is built over that much time. The way a we can hear three notes of a song and be transported into nine different times when they listened to that melody together. The way a we can walk by a restaurant that’s been six different restaurants and remember the first time they ate their together and all the meals in all its different iterations. The way a roadside rest stop can conjure a decade of drives to Vermont.
I am still too often surprised by a wave of grief, which washes through after an experience that hearkens back to a past that no longer exists in the same way, even as a memory. My ongoing divorce has not only radically changed how I live now; it has shattered the lens through which I look at my past, too. Joyful memories, comfortable memories, loving memories-they are all cast into doubt. Spoiled. Was what I lived real? And if it was, how did I lose my life?
Starting a few weeks ago, I have literally been running up against one such file folder of memories. In late August, I decided to run up to The Cloisters Museum and Fort Tryon Park in New York. From my old apartment, it was a 14-mile run, there and back. I’ve moved further north, and further east, so I wasn’t sure how much shorter the run would be. 3 miles shorter, it turns out…
