nave

...there are hollows where she still haunts, a lingerer, ever, and grants me in those spaces little peace; but these are reserves that have been created, much like the government here creates physical ones for the Native Americans, to sequester and manage, not to keep alight, not to inflame, not as some future prospect now laid dormant to when in better shape revive and rejoice over. Ours was a tumultuous beginning fraught with anxieties and remained so until the very last hour or second, whenever exactly that was (for who can know such a thing if we're to judge "the end" by a mutual cessation of emotional attachment; or at least a severance sufficient to preclude the possibility that there will be a future reunification?)

Why am I mentally, and unbidden, revisiting old painful haunts and experiencing--unlike only a short time ago--not the benumbed sense of a remembered past but a searing indictment on existence, a papryus of testimony to the agony humans can cause to one another, can inspire?

Further speculation would prove fruitless. The best approach is a tactic; the best tactic is to wilfully ignore these flitting monstrosities of memory and focus on the present. If the past drives itself into the forefront of consciousness against my will, against my better interests, then ignore it, white knuckle the process down to a nothingness. Of course the question always remains in the back of my mind, nurtured by exposure to psychoanalytical beliefs about the subconscious and its power to convey our greatest needs or perhaps even truths: do the memories come, freshly painted in new bright blazing colours, as the random cruelty of an afflicted mind, or do they come bearing gifts, warnings, a plea to something else, somewhere else. I can't know that but can this: whenever I've given over to a more superstitious interpretation of my memories/past/thoughts; whenever I sought to let them guide me rather than take a rationale approach, they have almost unfailingly lead me to unhappiness of one kind or another.

So, take stock: you've not accomplished a fraction of what you want to; and your every relationship has been a failure, including your marriage. Take stock, warn thyself. The past proves useful to me only in this way: as a warning not to act impulsively, to think with the same calculation that the very wren now haunting you always did, except at her most vulnerable moments, and those seem to me in hindsight to have been exceedingly rare.

And then, with a mocking bow and soft salute, I deny the advice just rendered. My allegiance is with the blighting horror and indifference and exuberance of the past: it was mine, the only coin given to recompense breath. To my employer, then, as always, serviam.