choices

    I wish I had a friend. I don't mean that the way it sounds; I have lots of friends, in the abstract. Some in the particular, too--the very particular, even, so that it is hard to imagine aspects of my life without them. But right now, I wish I had a friend of a sort that I don't have. I need someone to go to Galena with me. I need someone to go ghost-banishing with me.
    I suppose that the mere fact that I want company for this mission renders the mission itself suspect. If I need help with it, perhaps the ghosts aren't ready to be banished. Or, more accurately, perhaps I am not ready to let them go. Maybe it isn't healthy to do it at all, unless I can do it alone: drive out there and remember the other drives out there, before--past Freeport--and into town, to see the places that are now different, on purpose. (It is harder, having some really fantastic pictures of it, because it is even more and probably permanently ingrained in my mind.) It would not be any easier with anyone else there, and it might even be worse. I already feel like a lot of this stuff inside me doesn't really "translate", so maybe it would reduce some of the pressure if I didn't try so hard to do it. Maybe taking someone along would just be too much pressure to explain; why am I crying already, just coming over the bridge? Why does this doorway matter? Why does the Night Depository drawer on the bank make me both laugh and cry?
    The thing is, I'm sort of afraid that I'll get there and be able to do some of it, but some part of it will be just too much, and then...I'll be there. Stuck.
    I know it won't happen that way.
    But what if it does?
    Sometimes it's just overwhelming, the desire to put it all away. To find a drawer that's big enough to shove all the memories into, so that I can have my life back. I know it's impossible to do it all at once, but that doesn't mean I won't keep trying.
    It doesn't really matter, anyway. I know that even if they were all in the drawer, even if I had "successfully forgotten," the time would come when I was in the right (i.e. wrong) frame of mind, and I got the wrong (i.e. right) glimpse of the chest of drawers, and I would remember what was in that drawer...and it would be back, all of it, as if I'd never put it away.
    But at least it wouldn't get me without having to work at it. The pain would be earned.
    I digress, I guess, from the point of the post. I wish I had a friend, with whom I could go on this quest. Someone who would do it, no questions asked.
    (Why do we ask that, above all else? Isn't it better to have someone who cares enough to ask the right question at the right time?)
    Someone who would mop up my tears, again. Someone who would take the wheel if I just couldn't do it for one more minute.
    I guess that's the point. That's what got me here, asking these questions. I made my choice.