Remembering

I wrote this blog post exactly THREE years ago.  

Things have changed quite a bit over the past years, as they always do.  We grow older, people who were in our lives are no longer and new ones enter.  The spaces left are sometimes never filled completely, the impint remains as a reminder.  Memories,  some you long to recreate and some you wish were never a part of the story, the light and the shadow, both.

Chasity was both, as I am both, light and shadow.  

 I keep my shadowy parts in check for the most part, posturing and tucking and hiding my humanity as best I can.

My desire to live in the present moment where the true living is experienced keeps me from going to the past on any regular day.  Regret becons, as do guilt and shame.  I greet them and bid them good day.  But, on days like today, revisiting is a given, a choice to remember. 

The squeezing in my chest reminds me of the absence and the imprint that will forever remain. Tears well behind my eyes and after I've felt the sadness, I turn to the happiest memories.  The ones we capture with a flash and a smile and I'll never forget the ways our lives are changed because she was here with us, laughing, living and dying.