7 Years and a few days

The 7 year anniversary came and went. I called his sister and his dad. I tried to go visit the neighborhoods where we lived in the beginning. I ended up lost. You can't go home again if you can not find it, even with GPS. I have been thinking and dreaming a lot about all the people I have lost, all my loves and my mom.

6 Years 2 Months - Loss of Past

It is strange. All my past loves are dead and I am only in my forties. First was the death of my husband of eleven years. Next, the three-year love affair I have always described as obsessive. We had stayed in touch for years afterwards. I was feeling reminiscent during my lonely holidays and the urge to get together had been growing for months. Therefore, I searched on-line. I found a guest book with the right name. Once I opened it, my first thought was it was the wrong person. It was a memorial guest book. Even when I read the condolences, to the mother, the father, the twin, all with the right names, it still did not seem right. At the bottom, there was a link to pictures. Pictures I have copies of in my old photo albums. The entries were six months old.
Then this year I started re-connecting with high school classmates through social networking. That is how I found out my high school sweetheart of four years had died the same summer as my obsession. A quick search found the simple obituary. There was only one great love left. I knew he must be gone as well. It seemed fatalistic thinking. I researched and found nothing. He started appearing in my dreams. I do not know how long it had been since I had dreamed of him, decades perhaps. His sister found me, a week after he died this spring. During the first five years as a young adult on my own, he was my love.
It is unsettling. They are in my past, love long faded, hurts forgotten, only bits of memories remaining, mostly ones reinforced by story telling or photos. Yet, there is still a sense a loss. These were all people I had loved. I have discounted those old loves as less than the love affair with my husband. However, when I pull out the photo albums stored in a trunk and flip through the discolored pages, I am no longer sure. So many years shared. All the lovers, who carried our private memories with them, as I carried our shared memories, are now gone, passed, dead. Only a one sided version remains. It seems a natural occurrence, if I was in my eighties perhaps and not halfway there. Fourteen to eighteen, eighteen to twenty-three, twenty-five to twenty-eight, thirty to forty-one, a large chunk of life is closed. Obviously closed already, yet sealed shut now. The mystery of these unrelated deaths overwhelms me. Then last week, a heart attack. My first tiptoe back into dating, talks of marriage, hours every day on the phone, perhaps my rebound, a part of the past circling around to the present. A year moved too fast and ended as suddenly. I wonder now if I have a strange black widow effect on people who fall in love with me as I can add forty-six to forty-seven in the blank file.