Coping...

The single thought that's been getting me through the past 36 hours is the one new thought that's taking root. It's not a total loss. Everything else can be replaced, by and large.

That's not the thought. This is the thought.

I've been trying to figure out who I could call, because I've really needed to talk about this. Ian understands. He was so completely empathetic when I explained to him the scope of the loss - nearly 15 years of my life in writing. He understood that, as I expected he would, being a writer himself. (He was astounded when I told him it encompassed over 1500 pages, which made his sense of the loss more in tune with the reality of the thing for me.) (Also, I do not consider myself a writer on par with Ian Allen. I do not have that talent. But I am a writer in the sense that I do take the time to evaluate and record things about my life and my thinking - things a lot of people do, but perhaps do not do to the detail that I did.) So Ian understands. But, right or wrong, I don't consider Ian someone who has any interest in listening to my blobbering sob story. So I was thinking yesterday about who I could call as I was sitting around just trying to avoid thinking about the depth of the loss. And among the people I thought about was Nicole.

I remembered something I either remember her saying, or an attitude she had about the way my mind operated in general. The gist of it, at any rate, was that I held on too hard to the past. And maybe, just maybe, this is a way for me to let some of that go, to let some things that I've been holding on to for too long fade away. As I've looked back on high school, for instance, I've realized just how miserable an experience that was for me. Maybe I should let all of that go. I'm no longer in touch with anyone from high school anyway, so maybe that's just better in the long run. Maybe I am in some small way still struggling with the ghosts of Melanie and Nicole - though I don't really feel that. But maybe the fact that I could go back and read about those times, about September 1997 through Spring of 1997 specifically, gave me the slightest connection to all of that. Maybe it's just better that I no longer have a tangible attachment to those times.