Atoned
Yom Kippur is the 24 hour period where you atone for your sins. You are supposed to enter this time by forgiving all of those who have trespassed against you and asking forgiveness from all of those you have trespassed against. It’s a tall order and I can assure you few people are able to come clean on both sides. I woke up and went upstairs before Tin was up, so that I could fast and meditate and center myself in a full cycle of completion – another year around the sun.
Instead of having any profound thoughts or an epiphany about what had gone before or what was coming up, I came to the slow conclusion that I am in a transition period where emotions run the gamut of incredible highs and darkly lows, and honestly, I had the luxury of spending the morning surrounded by old photographs that depicted other lives I’ve lived – Steve had sent me a couple of manilla envelopes filled with old photos that accidentally wound up in one of his boxes. There is a photo of me on the ferry to Ship Island, hanging out with my gay waiters when I was a hostess at Arnaud’s, then one of me with my first love, Ken, who was 16 years older than me and almost looks as if he might be my father in those photos, then ones of me at my high school dance with my first boyfriend Billy Filmore, the one in front of a Christmas tree (a rare occasion in my life), and other photos of lives that I lived long ago. I went through each photograph with no form of melancholy or sentimentality other than huh.
I sat cross-legged on the bed that is now in my office, soon to be our bedroom/office, years of trying to separate my living from my working life has now got me moving towards a world with no distinction between work and personal. I was not trying but inevitably looking into my future and inevitably I kept getting pulled back into my past – it might have been the photographs that were scattered on the bed.
All this work on my spiritual self to overcome years of bad habits is starting to pay off. My mind kept pulling me into extremes – thinking about the past and who I was in that past, thinking about the future and what might become of me, us, the world. And I remembered to pull back from those edges, because they are meaningless – the past can easily be constructed to fit any narrative you choose, the future is yet unwritten so again choose a narrative. But aligning the self is about the here and now and taking for granted that you can’t know the future, the past doesn’t matter anymore, and so it’s just me and my photographs in my soon to be bedroom/office.
I ran into an old friend and told him about the photographs and he later left a message saying he thinks about what it was like to be young, to be 28 years old, to be carefree and unknowing, not with regret, more like just thoughts about then and now. Who would want to give up being 50 something for being 20 something? I don’t think anyone. 20 something was so full of tomorrow and 50 something is so full of right now.
When it was time to come downstairs, I felt like I had atoned for all those lives I lived before, the ones where I might have hurt someone, or more likely hurt myself, and I atoned for the future where I might be called to answer for myself. I atoned for not having taken more time to simply be, for not having appreciated the people I love more, for not having allowed myself to bask in the many splendid moments that have come my way. Coming and going, coming and going, coming and going, and always too soon.