Past is Parallel

June has always been a strange time of year for me. It’s my birthday month, and so always carries a certain melancholy I associate with growing older. This year it also coincides with the end of my 12-month Writing Fellowship with the Centre for Stories. During that time I’ve been working on a collection of poetry around events and experiences spanning about 10 years of my life. So maybe my desire to self-reflect, to think about my past and imagine my future, has been particularly pertinent, a kind of communing with my past and future selves.

Even as a child I was always head-in-the-clouds, or “off with the fairies,” as my grandmother says. Introspective. I used to imagine, throughout different ages of my childhood and adolescence, what my life would look like in 10 years. Who would I become at 18? What would I be doing at 25? Where would I live, and who would I love at 33? Would I be happy?

Then, as a child, I observed the passage of time with fear. Afraid to lose my memories and myself, I kept and collected objects that reminded me of people, places and events, both special and mundane. I’d recall memories often and fondly, but with the fear that it hadn’t been real, and with sadness that I could never return to that exact moment, or to who I was at that exact minute or hour.

The older I get, the more time passes, and the more memories I have to hold onto. I’ve realised, especially through working on my manuscript, that time isn’t linear, that it travels in a spiral. I’ve realised that all the selves I’ve ever been, every age I ever was, have never been lost to me. I realised that my introspection and imagination mean I can, in a way, time travel – recall the past or imagine the future with such vividness and emotion that it becomes a kind of recreation, in a real enough way.

Poetry, too, has become a way to keep and hold onto who I was and who I am. Alongside collecting rocks and seashells and my schoolfriend’s notes, I began scribbling odes and elegies in the notes app on my phone. But this past year, while editing old poems and writing new poems of past stories and selves, I have started to understand and separate myself from the person in the poems. They are not me, though they are parts of me, like a childhood photograph where I can trace my face around who I am now. They are my memory, recreated and imperfect. They are a persona and a reflection, born of but separate from me.

For a long time, ever since I realised I could become a writer, I have dreamed of publishing a book. This dream now moves ever closer to reality. It fills me with joy, but the older, wiser part of me knows how difficult it is to be successful as a full-time writer, and works very hard at a day job to keep that dream and myself alive, sometimes to the detriment of my mind and body. And as familiar as I am with the mundane, less than glamorous reality of being a writer, I am realising that through the slog of the everyday, and the dark haze of burnout, that for some inexplicable reason, writing is what keeps me going. The embodiment of creation and connection I encounter by putting words on a page is something I deeply crave, something I need. And somehow, that is enough.