Back Into the Closet With You, Mr. Bones

Image created with ChatGPT Image Generator (AI is good for some things, after all)

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — William Faulkner

Another thing about the past as you get older: there’s a lot of it. So much so that sometimes its storage system goes amiss. Treasures get accidentally tossed out, while useless junk keeps getting in the way when searching for what you’re trying to recall.

Outdated identities and belief systems rattle around long after they’ve served their purposes — and not just in our own inner attics, but in those of people who’ve known us for a long time. 

Occasionally, one of these aimless, clackity specters, one that concerns you, emerges from someone else’s memory. Something you never even knew had happened, and yet, now that you’re made aware, disrupts everything you thought, felt, or believed to be true about a major chunk of your life.

This happened to me a few months ago. While chatting with a dear friend whom I’ve seen only occasionally since we shared an earlier passage of our lives, she let slip a casual remark.

If you were expecting a tell-all, this isn’t that. All you need to know about the remark is that it unearthed a secret that rearranged my past with the force of an imploding skyscraper.

I have no idea what my face looked like as I took her words in. I did see her face fall like a dropped rock. “Oh, my God,” she said. “I thought you knew.”

I didn’t know. I didn’t even suspect. Not seriously, anyway.

She felt horrible. 

I wasn’t in such great shape myself. There I sat, in a beautiful tasting room in a Virginia winery, watching with a kind of dull wonder at the invisible skeleton that had leapt from the dark. It grinned madly as it danced, gleefully scattering and trampling decades of memories.

Memories that were unraveling at the edges like threadbare, rotten cloth.

I felt as though I were in the center of a macabre snowglobe, maybe one designed by Tim Burton. It was horrifying, fascinating, watching as my past swirled in glittering, shattered fragments.

But as the fragments settled, they fell into place. They formed a new pattern, one that finally made sense. It was as though a missing shape had been dropped into the puzzle, rearranging all the other pieces into a much clearer pattern.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. — King James Bible, John 8:32

The pattern was clear, and its truth was undeniable. But it wasn’t easy to look at; it was painful, like a too-bright light flooding eyes accustomed to dim surroundings.

Because this unearthed secret, this laughing skeleton, didn’t only announce that I had lived for so long inside someone else’s carefully constructed illusion. Those closest to me, for whom I bore the responsibility of protection and nurturance, had been similarly trapped in the same bubble.

Questions began unspooling in my mind. How could I not have known? Who else knew? When was this happening? What else was I in the dark about?

And inevitably: what do I do now?

Here’s the thing: in a way, this skeleton’s escape came too late. The builder of the illusion, the architect of the bubble — who no doubt believed it would never burst — has been gone from this Earth for a couple of decades and counting.

How surprising, then, that the wound feels so fresh.

Especially painful is the wound of injustice. Of never knowing the score, or even the rules of the game. All that was decided for me and about me, without my having the information I needed to make a fully informed decision about whether or not I wanted to keep playing.

It made me want to grab hold of the skeleton and parade it in the sunlight for all the world to see. 

If I were younger, I might have done just that. But I’m older now, and less tempted to leap to the defense of my persona — especially when it’s a persona I’ve outlived.

In truth, pain is the price of freedom . . . — Michael A. Singer

There is an entire network of people in my life who, were I to inflict the skeleton on them, would similarly have their sense of personal history violently rearranged. 

Other than a dark and fleeting moment of vengeful satisfaction for me, what good would that do? 

There’s plenty of pain circulating in the world as it is. 

So I’m reclaiming that skeleton, and back it goes into the closet, inert for now. I am less and less interested in it as each day passes. Eventually, I expect it will crumble into dust.

Faulkner may be correct. The past may not even be past. 

But it only has the power I grant it.