Roshomonics
It’s what people do when they break up. They revise. They edit. They excise. They embellish. They reconstruct their personal perception of history to validate their choices.
Naturally, it’s what I *haven’t* done this time around. For me, the whole thing still starts with a slow dance and ends with an acrimonious goodbye at parking slot 68. I’ve allowed everything that happened in between to remain either cherished or forgiven.
I need to do the rewrite. Clearly, there are some memories I should treasure less and others I should resent more.
Sorry about all the melodrama.
The antibiotic seems to be helping. I could actually take deep breaths today.
#####Purgation lyric of the day:
I hope you got fat.
— Violent Femmes, “Fat”, 1988
August 13th, 2005 at 11:04 AM
Oh, yes. Bitterest revenge song ever, except that that first line is all that’s ever quoted. The whole dealie is that fat girls is alright and come back to me cos I still want you. Long line of misquoted misappropriated lyrics, I spose…
August 13th, 2005 at 3:09 PM
No, I knew I was quoting out of context. The entirety of the lyric is very funny and very sad.
August 14th, 2005 at 12:26 PM
Editing and rewriting history is a normal response to pain…but sometimes NOT doing that revision is a bargain we make with our conscience. My own experience with breakups has been the other party very quickly excising the awkward or inconvenient parts to construct a narrative in which I was entirely to blame for any failings, and any good parts of our relationship were just, um, some kind of temporary insanity. I know it’s my vanity, but my response is the desire to be “better” than that. I spend way too much time rehashing the past and burrowing through my own memories to sustain a really good counter-narrative for very long.
My deal with my conscience is that I’ll try to remember the good and the bad as accurately and unsparingly as possible — including the good in the other party, and the horrible mistakes I made — and in return, Jiminy Cricket won’t bust me in the kneecaps, knee me in the groin, and finally bash me over the head with a broken bottle.
Obligatory comics reference: I learned what it meant to be someone who lives mostly inside his own head from a couple of folks named James-Michael Starling and Howard the Duck, so I have to assume their creator might know a little something about that experience as well.