Old Flames and Their Bright, Shiney Dimness

There is currently debate in my family about old flames.   You know…as in old boyfriends.   

Since about September of 2009, they’ve been a much discussed subject; namely the impact these past liaisons have had on the present.    In the case of  a Kendrick, that’s always the case.

My sisters and I are three women who have spent a lifetime idealizing what we once had.   Memories that have faded and yellowed with time, seem to have a way of rewriting history to make it more palatable.   We allow that to happen.   We’re convinced that old love is better than current love–regardless—so we drag the old love corpses out of the closets of our gray matter a la Norman Bates and we flatly refuse to acknowledge the obvious decomposition.    No, it’s still intact and just as viable as it was…….45 years ago?????????

My God. 

At one time, I thought rekindling two old loves (I’ve been in love only twice in my life) would be thee most romantic thing EVER.   Well, the Universe saw fit to allow me to reconnect with the two men who I once loved and for whatever reason, never quite got over.     What happened, you ask?  Read this primer I’ve written on rekindling, and you tell me.

I will begin with a question:  ever seen the film,  ”Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”?    Interesting tale.  It’s all about two people who meet as complete strangers as they walk along the beach.  They’re inexplicably drawn to each other.    So, as their subconscious minds ( meld together in this primordial  gooey soup of attraction)  they spend the evening together and by the end of the night,  Clementine (Kate Winslet) tells her newly found ‘soul mate’ (Jim Carrey) that…and I quote….”I’m going to marry you Joel, I know it.”

She knew it, because that’s exactly what she’d done before.

See, these two people are former lovers who were lucky enough to have had  their memories erased after a very painful breakup.    Doesn’t that sound idyllic?   To be free of that pain and heartache?    But as the movie goes on, we realize that there’s a price to be paid for this kind of pain-free freedom.  Without the Boeing 767 cargo hold filled with  baggage still intact from their old relationship, the former couple becomes current again.  If memory serves, the movie ends but we’re left to believe that they date,  they fall in love.   Everything is great.  We assume they marry, have kids and a mortgage and all that rot.

But this is fantasy and science fiction and well, okay…a love story that would be lovely if it were real, but it isn’t.  Life doesn’t work that way.   I can’t remember what was used to erase their memories in the movie but today,  denial, desperation and the co-dependent need NOT to be alone comprise the perfect memory eraser these days.    

All too often, we compromise what we need for what we want and we want the immediate gratification of love and sex and the need to feel needed and wanted.  We are willing (well, more women than men) to look the other way and allow into those things in  our lives that we deem safe and often, what’s available.   We settle.  

We have to have real, clear concise memories of the pain and bullshit that went into making all these past relationships, the PAST RELATIONSHIPS that they are.    Without them, we become walking, talking human representations of the axiom Jorge Santyana once scribed:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it

But in our constant pursuit to quell the human condition, we do not remember.  We don’t want to remember.  Pining for old loves allow us to forget all the negative, nasty stuff that happened and makes it worth remembering again.  

Check this out: a recent survey indicated that something like 62-percent of  those queried said they’d  consider getting back together with a former lover.  Why?  Time heals; aging squeals….and our senses force us to repeal all those things that caused us to break up in the first place.  None of that happened.   Everything was rosy.  Deny, deny, deny.  

Bausch and Lomb should really try to capture the nostalgic lens market.  They’d make a zillion dollars.   We love peering through these goggles because they distort, then sugar coat all the problems.   Can’t you hear the excuses?   Pain?   What pain?    We were young and stupid.  We didn’t know what we wanted.   She moved away.   I went into the service.   We went our separate ways in High School; in college.   He turned gay.   She became a man.

Blah cubed.

Nostalgia is wonderful, when it remains a memory;  when it becomes a lifestyle choice it morphs into a nasty reality skewed melange of Baby Jane and Nora Dinsmoor of Dickens’ Paradiso Perduto (from the contemporary adaptation of Great Expectations, thank you very much), with a little Blanche Dubois thrown in for good measure.  Reality is distorted; it then becomes manufactured.

So, if you’re thinking about looking on Facebook see if that old 7th grade boyfriend is social media savvy or not, please…I BEG YOU….keep a few things in mind if you happen to find him and make contact: 

If you want to rekindle an old flame and he’s available and interested (and trust me, I speak from experience on this)  it is imperative that you first discuss what went wrong initially.   You have to bring up the past.  For starters, it’s the only thing you have in common in the beginning and secondly, you’ll both need questions answered.  You owe it to each other.   If nothing else, w it can give you much-needed closure.   

Reuniting with an ex seems very romantic; very Hollywood,  but  really, nothing can happen in any relationship of any kind unless you learn the vital lessons that can only come from a break-up.   There are two sides to every story.  No one is ever purely the bad guy OR the victim.   It takes two people to make a relationship work and two to implode it.   Until you are willing to do the work (and it’s painful) and learn all you can about the role you played in your own break up,  you’ll bring the same old crap with you into this new effort.   It will only end as it did the first time.   Yeah, sure time and separation and even distance can be healing factors, BUT—not when old contentions come into play.

When contemplating rekindling a long dead relationship, you have to ask yourself a few questions:  do you really miss her or are you just lonely and abhor dating?   You see, exes are wonderfully convenient packaged deals.  They already know your brand of Scotch, your seafood allergies and all ABOUT your strange  sexual proclivities–things that would absolutely freak out anyone else.   Getting back together may seem like it’s better than the awkwardness of dating a complete stranger…but trust me, familiarity and security aren’t good enough reasons to relive the past.   Trust me, they just aren’t.    

And this is the biggest question of all: why did you break up in the first place?   If your ex cheated on you or treated you like a doormat or if happiness existed in minute qualities that never really lasted, do you really want to sign up for another tour of duty, just because he or she is familiar and a relationship with him or her requires less effort?  

The reality is that some people just aren’t supposed to be together.   Relationships sometimes have a shelf life.   Now, if you can find someone who sends you soaring and has for  the past 45 years of your life together, great.  I envy you, but in this day of disposable emotions and commitment “use by dates”,  you’re the exception, not the rule.   And to be honest, I’m really and truly sorry that has to be that way.

But it is this way.  

Yes, love is precarious.   It’s delicate and complicated and at times, wonderfully awful.   We forget our roles and how we help make it work.   We sometimes forget what we did to destroy it.     For me, all rekindling has ever done was answered long-standing questions why it didn’t work in the first place.    And that’s okay.   As I mentioned, closure has its merit.

And that’s what I’ll do now–I’ll close this rant, but I’ll leave you with this:   just about everyone has an ex and if you want to make what’s old new again, you have to decide for yourself whether an old flame is worth rekindling or extinguishing.  You’ll know if its worth it because let’s be honest; when it works, it works.   And when it works, well, make no mistake,  it can be glorious.   I know many couples who’ve broken up only to get back together again and they’ve created marvelous, loving relationships the second time around.   Some even walked down the aisle together.   There are thousands of couples who did just that, then divorced, then years later remarried each other and created joy and bliss.    So yes, of course, miracles do happen.

And so do the same old mistakes from the past.   

I think that should answer your question.c

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The Secret Life of A Hotel Room

They are alive, you know.  And not only that, they have feelings, too.   Don’t ask me how, but they do. 

I think it’s because they absorb the energy of their occupants.   That means every time you walk into one, whether it was just vacated an hour earlier or one week earlier,  the residual energies are still there. 

That is until you walk around the place, use the poddy, lie on the bed (sans covers please, I hear those things are a veritable petri dish of contagion) and get your emotional DNA all over the room.

You can’t stop and think about who stayed there before you.  If you did, you’d go crazy and never stay in another one ever again.  You can’t think about the amount of hygiene (or lack thereof)  employed by the previous toilet squatter; of the debauchery that took place early on the very same Sealy Posturpedic on which you now lie.   

Let’s face it, hotel rooms, regardless of the high dollar interior designers who were paid big money to make canary yellow wall paint go with navy chintz, are hard to be really comfortable in.   They’re not your home, not your tastes.  They’re nothing other than rooms in a big building owned by corporations which employ the same men in the same black vests and matching trousers to whom you gave some money who in turn gave you a  key that unlocks a somewhat tastefully appointed room with a bed and marbled pissoir.  For the duration of your stay it becomes way station, a port in a storm…a place to rest your head until check out time at 11 the next morning.

Maybe, but hotel rooms, regardless of the amount of stars with which Michelin rates them, are always cold and starkly impersonal and they have such a temporary feel about them.  I think they’re designed to make you want to go back home.   But unlike home, you have no attachment and certainly, no responsibility to a hotel room.    That’s the best part:  you can simply walk away from them; shut the door on your way out, and leave a mess, if you want.  There are always hotel maids.    But they only clean up the mess that can be seen.   There’s that psychic mess…the room is crowded with paramecium-like, paisley shaped flotsam that swirls around pne at  head level.  Psychic mess is invisible to the naked eye, but in plain sight for those lucky enough to be born with a Third Eye. 

But whether you can sense it or not,  it’s all there,  angst–the remnants of a fight.  Passion that was exuded.  Expended tears of joy; tears of sadness.   Someone needed to escape a bad relationship;  a couple  came there to help repair one.   Someone stayed there for a job interview.  Someone needed a place to stay to attend their mother’s funeral.   Someone stayed there in order to be closer to her sister who was giving birth to her first child.   One man booked the room simply because he couldn’t tolerate being at home.

Every reason for checking in converts a simple 14 x 21 foot room into sanctuary…to a degree, anyway.

I stayed at a five-star hotel in downtown Houston this weekend.   I paid a lot of money to come to the gripping conclusion that the water tight compartments of my past which were never all that water tight to begin with, are suddenly becoming very water tight and in addition to that, they’re rapidly closing.   Sealing shut is a more appropriate term, I think.   And this closure isn’t because of anything I’m doing;  they’re closing out of attrition, I think.   I don’t go back  as often as I used to, but when I did, I’d stay there a while…make camp.   I’d wallow in a time that I felt was sooooooo much better.   These portals were wonderful; they separated me from the bad things…and  the good things, too;  those trusted ‘go to’ memories I kept resuscitating for any number of reasons.   But you have to let go when they let go of you.  They do that sometimes.  Either way,  it’s not easy, especially if you’ve spent years breathing so much life into them.  

But I stopped doing that this weekend.   I cut off their lifeline.    Don’t ask me what the correlation was between a five star hotel room and all of this shedding,  it was just the right place at the right time.    As a result, so many ghosts were released; so many demons were freed.   They’ve been with me all of my life, at first conspiring together to conspire against me, determined to haunt my memory banks, then that morphed into full-blown competition.  They’d fight a battle royale for supremacy and for the title of the BMIC (Big Memory In Charge) until I, the ultimate puppet master realized my own power and said, “No, I’m bored.  Now, go immediately to your respective corners.  Hell, my past wasn’t even all that ideal when it was my present!!” 

And this weekend, that’s exactly what I did and when they stopped, so did I.    I stopped beating my very last dead horse.    

And it all came to a head in room 1002.    

I can only imagine what it’s like in there now.   Deafening silence; a stifling mood.  Its latest occupants feeling this uncomfortable sense of regret and loss for no explicable reason.  But the question is, can this hotel where I stayed can make this room alright again for the next guest?   Can it be saved?    Yes, providing this well-known inn, with its overly attentive wait staff,  its courteous maids and bell boys,  its gracious parking attendants, knowledgable someliers and of course,  its annoyingly obsequious front desk clerks,  also has an exorcist on staff.

And someone well-versed in the removal of large animal carcasses.  Especially the metaphorical kind.

db