I write a lot but it occurred to me the other day that I don't write nearly as much as I used to. Not just on here (and I am gonna try and write more on here) but in general. I've been writing as long as I can remember. I was the only kid in my third grade English class that loved every single assignment. My first girlfriend also loved to write and really encouraged me to put down anything I was feeling. Her writing helped her get past her troubled childhood and, later, her father's sudden death. I remember thinking how terrible it was for her to have so much to get off her chest at such a young age. Obviously I had no idea that I would be in the same position just a few years later.
She's been on my mind a lot lately. It's been eight years since she went away and everything changed dramatically. I try not to think of her much because it usually sends me to a bad place. But I've realized that in the last year or so, I've finally gotten to a place where I can think of her and actually smile. That is a tremendous accomplishment for me. And it all started with a simple conversation back in April.
My first love's mother (and her entire family, really) did not care for me at all. I never knew why, it was just one of those things that I accepted. I often wondered how someone as amazing as my girlfriend could be related to the rest of her family. They all seemed so domineering and un-emotional, while she was incredibly passionate and open and loving. She and I knew everything there was to know about each other and we fit so well but when you're young, it's tough to keep stuff together. You wanna experience and learn all you can about other people and about the world and you think you have all the time in the world to do it. I rarely spoke to her mom or sister in the entire time (about seven years) we knew each other. I didn't speak to them for a very long time after my girlfriend went away. I don't think any of us would've known what to say to each other anyway.
I didn't know it until much later, but my girlfriend had always felt like she wasn't meant to stay in this world for a long time so she made sure to take care of everything she might leave behind. She left a lot of her stuff to me, including everything she'd ever written or filmed or drawn. All of it sat in storage for around five years because I couldn't bring myself to look at any of it. I finally sat down and went through it and I knew most of what she'd written about, but the short films she left behind were just...suffocating for me to watch. They brought a whole new set of nightmares. Her family believed that everything she had should've gone to them and not me and they tried to get it all back through the court system. For awhile I felt like they were right because it's not like we had been married. But then I thought about how she'd felt about her family and how she loved them but obviously didn't trust them with her thoughts and feelings if she'd left all of this to me. So I fought to hang onto it.
Things were getting very ugly in our legal battle earlier this year when her mother came by my place and asked to talk. This was a no-no according to the lawyers but I sensed something different about her so I agreed. We sat, just the two of us, in the kitchen talking about everything we missed and loved about this wonderful person. We talked about how it didn't seem like she'd been gone eight years but it also seemed like much longer, in a way. Then we got to what the root of our problem had been all these years and it was something I'd never thought of before. She told me she was jealous of the relationship I'd had with her daughter. She felt she'd made serious mistakes in her upbringing and she'd never apologized for those. And she felt that her failures had led to their strained relationship and had kept her from really knowing her daughter as well as she wanted to. I came into the picture and I helped my girlfriend calm down and deal with things and we became extremely close and that led her to pull away from her family some because she had somewhere safe to go. Her mom has a lot of regrets about how things were between them.
It was a painful and very eye-opening conversation to have. I can't shake how sad it is that we couldn't get along when the person we loved was alive but that's how it was supposed to be, I guess. Guilt is something I never thought about her mom having felt after she left, yet it's something I wrestled with for a very long time. I still do sometimes. We feel/felt it for different reasons but it is the same emotion at the end of the day. We came to an understanding that we're similar in a lot of ways. And, for the first time, I saw a lot of my girlfriend in her mother. I hadn't thought about it until our conversation but we're always gonna be oddly connected because we both loved the same person. And I can't imagine losing a child, my daughter is the one thing I've ever been involved in that's been perfect, so I now see this situation through very different eyes. I think part of my being able to think of her without it being a negative is having this new relationship with her mother. Don't get me wrong, it's still rough some days and I'm not sure how one ever 'gets over it' but I can deal now. Much better than I used to be able to. You never forget but you have to learn to move on and it's taken me a long while to learn that. But I'm glad that I had to have that convo to really get there.
