nostalgia and pain, round...what, 379?

So, personal news...I was finally able to listen to Carnival of Rust again. In tracking down the link to that song, I discovered I can also watch the video again, which used to be the most massive heart punch, and would reduce me to tears for several years after...well, after.



I don't know entirely what that says. I regained the ability to listen to VNV Nation about two years after that particular relationship imploded. Curiously, I was able to listen to Thrice's Artist in the Ambulance only six months after the vampire died and was resurrected.



Does it speak to the intensity of the relationship? Perhaps. It's been seven years, after all, since I stopped being able to listen to Poets of the Fall. Or perhaps some things cut more deeply than others. And maybe it's the difference in musical tone--Thrice tends to write hard rock, VNV Nation writes chill electronica, by and large, and Poets...they write from a place of emotion, they always have. Usually strong emotion, and very rarely positive.

Perhaps that's why.

And I will never cease to be fascinated, and occasionally baffled, by my avatar choices during the years. Past my cyber-fae-digibot in imitial incarnation, I was anything that struck my fancy until the first place I settled. And then I was mostly human on stage, dancing, and mostly the archetypal goth girl off. My 'goth phase' (which still occasionally resurfaces), featured an extreme tilt towards hair the color of raven wings or snow, or both, ice-white skin, and unnerving eyes. It didn't help that I took so many pictures in virtual graveyards at the time. Of course I was also dating a vampire, so...I guess the company I kept made the assumptions easy.

And then I moved from the mainland, and it was neko, all the way. And while I had light and dark and rainbow-hued furred cats, my main presentation was pale. Pale stripes, pale spots, it didn't seem to matter. Most of the faces the one behind the VNV Nation songs saw were snow-white cats.

And then, the years that the one who gifted me with Poets of the Fall saw. Of course there were many other incarnations--fluffy rabbits, reindeer in winter, my beloved Arctic Fox avatar, more cats...but I was starting to feel my way into a recognizable, sort-of single face. The hair color changed, daily if not hourly, but I had dropped to about six eyes I rotated through, instead of thirty-six, and only about ten skins, overall, instead of the 500+ I owned at the time.

At the time, I thought I loved them all. If I had to emotionally detach, I'd say the first one that left a solid impact was sort of my first "crush"--and as such, I was wildly melancholic when he left. I literally mourned, black lace armband and all, for two solid months, until he came back. And then I wondered what I saw in him at all. Maybe he never changed; maybe I did. I stubbornly refused to break up with him, trapped in sadness and depression, until he finally told me he'd moved, met someone else, and not to contact him again. The only times I heard from him for the next year was if he needed money. Go figure.

The first job I had off the mainland, I hadn't intended to fall in love again. But I have always been lured by troubled boys, and if he was nothing else, he was definitely troubled. And strangely, even more so than the vampire, we matched each other in a sense--two completely different avatar representations, but both of us loved the starkness of white skin and black makeup. He was the first love I'd ever had, on or offline, that managed to make me jealous. I had literally never battled the emotion before, and it terrified me. And it still took me a year of people advising me to leave before I actually did, and the relationship was all but over by the time I did.

I will acknowledge, he was hard to detach from. I knew I had to; there was no other way if I wanted to stay sane. But...he knew me very well at that point, and he knew exactly how to draw me back in, with an IMed description, a word dropped in a friend's ear. It was masterfully manipulative, and I weirdly admired it. But the mere fact that I kept going back also made it harder to leave.

And then...the poet who introduced me to Poets. And him, I never wanted to leave. I struggled to understand the why, and after all these years, I've discovered some answers, and mamy aren't flattering. But it still hurt to be so completely cast aside, especially as I viewed myself as his, and it literally took three years to rebuild myself so that I was able to be independent again, and not an accessory, an adjunct, of him.

And now I find myself looking back again, all the pearls along the silken strand, all the songs that hold all the memories of the past. I do view it as a positive sign that I can reclaim music I once loved, and (mostly) listen without pain. I don't think these songs will ever make me less than reflective. I don't think I'll ever completely forget.

But then, how would I learn the lessons of the past if I forgot? Don't forget, but try to forgive, right? If not them, then the self I was when I was with them. And everyone in between them. I will always make mistakes, but maybe I can catch them sooner.

At least, that's the hope.

What does it say that the one song associated with someone in the past, I never lost the ability to to listen to? Maybe because I picked that out, for what it said about me, specifically, and what it said about us as a couple. Maybe that's it? I truly don't know.

Or maybe that's because that's the one relationship I've had, beyond the girl and Miss Neome, that, while it did implode and rain napalm down upon us, turned into more of the fire before rebirth, t han scorched earth.

Who knows.