Fragments

Yesterday morning I woke up with a start. I'd dreamed about a boy I went to elementary school with, who hadn't necessarily be a friend. His name, a name which I probably hadn't thought about it in twenty five years, floated into my head and lodged there.

I knew him since we were six. He had always been very popular, at a time when I was decidedly not. He had often given me a hard time when that was what everyone else was doing. But, in the end, around the time we were in fifth grade, I'd seen something different in him. A gentleness, a kindness, compassion. A heart there where I hadn't realized there was one before. I'd met his little sisters and saw that he adored them, and maybe that was the moment that I decided he wasn't who I'd assumed he was. And when we started Junior High, and bigger boys on the bus had picked on me more viciously than I was used to, he'd sat beside me. He didn't say anything, didn't stand up to the older boys, but he sat next to me in a way that felt protective. I've never forgotten that.

Except. Except I had. Except I'd forgotten him completely, hadn't thought about him at all in so many years. When I started Junior High, I'd found a group of friends for the first time who really thought like I did. I'd belonged in a way I didn't know was possible before and so had left behind most of my elementary classmates, who probably never wanted me anyway.  I had found and created a group that made me feel, for the first time, seen and heard and known. And then, at the end of seventh grade, I'd moved away.

My life, it seems, is remembered in fragments.

I feel like I've had so many lives. Elementary school separated from seventh grade by what seemed such a new beginning and opening into the world. Seventh grade separated from eighth grade by distance, by a move which was completely traumatic at the time and from which came some of the most meaningful friendships of my life - and of course, also my marriage. High school separated from college, college from grad school, grad school from my first year teaching. That year separated from the next year when I lived in Indiana, separated from the three year long lifetime I spent teaching in Texas, separated from the now in which I am a mother, a PTA mom, a Girl Scout leader. So many lives. So many fragments. So many puzzle pieces from which to work out who I really am.

Brene Brown says that we orphan the parts of our story that don't fit with our vision of who we are. I don't know. I don't know if that's why my life, my memory, is so broken apart.

But I want to put it back together.