X Girlfriend

It's odd to encounter someone from your past and see in them the seed of a person you used to know now grown into a person that you don't.

A few weeks back my wife found my high school girlfriend's blog and cued me into it. When my wife and I were dating she used to refer to this girl as my first wife because of how much history we had together. There was more than a little truth in that jibe. I learned a lot about love from loving her.

Of course, when you marry, you close the door on your romantic past. But you can't know someone the way I knew this girl and not wonder over the years whatever happened to the person who used to be the center of your world. It's not that I'd ever want to return to the past or trade my wife for her. But I also can't deny that who I am today owes something to that history - and there have been times when I wished I could bring the all of the pieces of me, past and present, together into one coherent whole.

Naturally, now that I know about her blog, I haven't been able to resist keeping up with her by looking at it regularly. It's interesting to see what she is up to now, but also a little strange. I've known for sometime now that she and her husband are out in the world living their own lives, independent of my own, but I've also maintained the fiction that the girl I once knew is still somewhere out there, too. Of course, she's not. She's all grown now, blogging about her husband and four kids.

I suppose that the idea that I could ever bring all of the pieces of me together into one whole is an illusion, too. Ultimately we all have to take the pieces of our lives as they are and make them work together without ever having all of the answers.