Actes Manqués

Insight truly is a beautiful thing… I was looking at pictures of my old school friends from Paris, most of them now with babies in their arms, and I was struck by a flood of memories rushing back to mind. I went for that old red folder containing all that is left of my school years – namely faded-looking birthday cards, actual photos that can be held in one’s hands (back in the days when no such thing as digital photos existed just yet… back in the days when teenagers would mostly use those throw-away types of cameras…). 

I looked at the little messages scribbled by my peers back in the days when we were all 14 or 15… and suddenly I understood. Suddenly, I was struck by an incredibly bright flash of clarity that allowed me to look back on my past with striking objectivity… and I saw the extent of what had been destroyed back then.

I had friends… I loved my friends… I loved them dearly. My best friends Maria and Célia… All the silly memories we had shared together in my last year in Paris before my mother decided to spirit me away overnight, urging me to cut all ties at once because it was ‘better that way’. What a lie!

“Don’t tell them anything. Don’t tell them we’re leaving. It’s over. There is no point in keeping in touch, Sarah.”

I remember it was the summer before my 17^th birthday when my mother came home in tears one day, telling me we were about to lose everything and that we simply had to leave. I stared at her in disbelief and I probably smirked. I was used to her grand dreams or fantasies; she used to talk about ‘leaving’ all the time but nothing ever happened and I was quite certain my life would always be the same predictable rut it had been so far. However this one time in my life I was proved wrong. Very wrong indeed.

I remember counting the days before we left… we were to leave at the end of the first week after school started again, but when I didn’t show up on the first day the phone started ringing at home.

“Don’t pick up,” said my mother.

We let the phone ring, and ring… until the answering machine took over and the voice of my best friend briefly filled the air. She was worried and hoped I wasn’t ill. She was looking forward to seeing me soon at school so she could tell me all about her summer adventures.I remember thinking "I wish so much I could just talk to you and tell you that I did write you a long letter but that I never sent it because... I know I'm leaving, and apparently there is no point in looking back or even letting you know."

The phone rang every day during that week but we never picked up. By Friday, my best friend’s voice sounded strained… pained and confused.

“Don’t pick up,” said my mother.

So I never picked up. And then we left, and after 10 years had passed I was finally confronted by this past I was made to leave behind...but only today have I come to understand what it was that was truly lost in the process: relationships.

Insight truly is a beautiful thing…

Unlike Gatsby, I don’t believe that the past can be repeated… what is lost in time is usually lost for good. Things change, nothing ever remains constant – that is the very nature of life itself, is it not?

I’ll always look back on my last year in Paris with a pang of bittersweet regret deep within my heart and I guess the secret urge to turn around and tell the now all-grown-up woman who used to be my best friend that she was just that, my best friend, will never leave me... that I am sorry, so sorry, and that I miss her dearly, and will always miss what can never be again even as I learn to accept that such is life.