Fiction From the Past

Found a couple of weeks ago in an old writing journal. I think I wrote it about five years ago....

Nights spent awake, thinking--desiring something unknown, or perhaps it was just unspeakable. There are these thoughts and feelings that lay right on the surface waiting to be scooped up and examined. But to touch them, to look at them beneath a microscope, would either kill them or make them grow. The dilemma then lies in what one wants. And that is what is unknown.

Sometimes it is like being split in two. There is the way life has become, and there is, joy in that life. There is no dissatisfaction in waking to the warm small body of a baby--feeling her rapid breaths against the hollow in your neck. In the darkness of morning, there is pleasure in seeing you dark body outlined by the night light. Often you are already up when I wake, and I miss your weight in the bed but love the sound of you moving in the other room.

Thus these other feelings confuse me. This horrible restlessness that fills me with this unspeakable yearning. How can yearn for something that would take this all from me? How can I want to leave this life that has brought me peace and security? Perhaps it is that the hourglass has begun to speed up. Is this a crisis of time or nature? I miss the me of the past. That me is a ghost which haunts the outer reaches of my life. I see that self possessed of a freedom I no longer hold. That self soars in the mist of memories with unclipped wings. I go about a rather predictable life not imagined by that past ghost. But this predictability holds an attraction to that past girl. I remember that she longed for peace and security for love. This future holds a promise of warm winter fires with wine for two not one. A world of watching school plays, packing wholesome lunches, shopping for school clothes. A world of firsts, first days of schools, first dates, first proms, first graduations. And that ghost did not even dare to imagine that future. But the woman now wonders..."Is this enough?"

I am unable to pinpoint when a conscious decision was made. There may not have been even a moment. These things are not like maps where you can push a pin to mark your travels. They arise slowly and move you until you are unsure when you opened yourself. I remember scooping the thoughts in a net and peering at them--wanting to throw them back but entranced at their promise. Even now with the gift of hindsight, I can not for sure say that I would have let them go.

The G who wrote this is now part of the same past she was imaging in this writing. More ghosts upon ghosts. This is a scary piece in light of the present. It speaks to what is happening now but I am not in the same space as I was when I wrote this. Remember it is fiction but all fiction carries the writer I think. Now the questions is: Do I continue the story?