Redeem yourself

“Those years were mainly shit, but there was some good stuff, and most of that was you.”  I find it hard to reply at first, because I’m so stunned at how selective his memory is.  Finally I remind him that he was actually pretty horrible to me. “ I TOLD you I’d been to rehab, “ he says, but he apologises, quite formally and in a way that makes me think he has forgotten the particulars.

Later I decide, just as formally, to forgive him.  It occurs to me that my memory is also selective: I remember the years when he was one of the people I loved most in the world, but dimly, through a haze of bitterness: I mainly remember the last part, when he was trying to destroy me; I pile up and pick over incidents scattered through those years, and choose to forget my part in them.  I don’t make excuses for him, but it’s too easy to remember myself as an innocent victim, and to forget the slow and steady emotional papercuts I inflicted too.  It crosses my mind that I would think that someone who refused to forgive me for what I did in my drink-and-drug-addled extended adolescence an idiot, and it’s not as though I, too, have not had to ask forgiveness, and been grateful to receive it.

From him I learned to watch my back, and to recognize an abusive relationship a mile off.  I should have learnt that a serious drug habit and amorality have to co-exist, but that was a lesson I made other people learn.  But it’s over.  The past is the past, and some people have to learn lessons the hard way, and I’m tired of picking it all over.

The thing about him, and all these boys from my past, is that if you get half-way to redemption, you remember the bits you learnt from – the bad bits.  You forget, until the past comes looking for you again, that somewhere in there you were loveable, that the things you effortfully forgive yourself for are the things others effortlessly forget.  I review the past in my head, and tot up all the bad I did, and think that I’m better now, but who is to say that in twenty years time I won’t be standing in judgment on this present me, who is hardly a picture of untarnished goodness, paragon though I tend to think I am?  And maybe in the future I’ll dismiss this present me in favour of the future me, so much older and wiser (again), and forget that it was still always me in there.   We are more than our deeds.

I hold to this, and decide to see him again, and although my memory has tried not to hold on to the good that I used to see in him, I let myself build up the good I see now.