Often

During my quiet days, my anti-social days, I often look back at my friendships, relationships and my interactions with my family and I get introspective. I wonder about whether or not I'm responsible for friendships that fell to the wayside or relationships that fizzled. I wonder who I hurt and who has hurt me... I know some of the hurt was unintentional... collateral damage for the situation. But other times, the hurt was due to carelessness, or immaturity, or disdain.


I also look back with a smile when I imagine some of the moments I've shared with people... watching the Northern Lights on the coulee edge with a close friend from University... sharing the perfect sunrise with someone new while extremely intoxicated during safe-grad... sharing moments of frustration with my travelling partners while navigating through a mysterious continent with what seemed to be an impossible language barrier... hiking to the top of a mountain without enough water and running the entire trail down to our stock of H2O... drinking wine for hours and talking about how lives become intertwined and how this moment in time was a conspiracy of the cosmos... talking to my wife while walking along the ocean or through a park, just trying to sort out our lives, all the while knowing that I have someone who will always listen and always forgive and who knows that even when I make mistakes that I have good intentions and I would never want to hurt her.

There are other moments... quieter moments I've spent alone, left to my own thoughts and my own devices. Strange moments where I feel lost, even in a familiar environment. Moments where I stare off into the distance or into the eyes of someone familiar, and suddenly things have changed. How, I cannot say. And moments where I write and feel like a poet who is all alone, even though I'm surrounded by people, realizing that lonliness has much more to do with our need to share than it does with our immediate environment and surroundings.

I changed the heading quote today after reading a story by an author named Jack Hodgins. I thought of my relationship with my parents and how it's transformed over the past 10 years, especially since moving away. Although I think I've acquired many of my mother's genetic traits, my father and I struggled to find common ground when I was younger because of our combined stubborness and our common need to be "right" in anything we did or said. Although I've learned how to reign in my stubborness more these days, I still have moments of weakness and I'm still easily frustrated by many things. I only hope that I become more flexible in years to come (even though I realize that the opposite is more likely). Dad and I still look at each other from across a metaphorical space of falling debris, but I know the space isn't nearly as wide as it once was, nor is the debris as dense. It felt like a chasm years ago... maybe it's simply as wide as the distance across a Sunday dinner table.

T