Filling in the Blanks

Accepting the past without answers

Illustration: Sydney Hanson

Do you still perform autopsies on conversations you had lives ago? 

~Donte Collins 

I am a liar. And the most common, most guilty of the lies I tell is only three words long. I don’t care. I say it more than I think it, through clenched tears and hot eyes, as though hearing it leave my mouth might make it true, but it never does. I do care. I care what my voice sounds like and if I have food in my teeth. I care what I look like when I dance. I care if people like me. I care if I was uncaring, dismissive, or cruel. I care about the exact moment in space and time when old friends stopped looking for me in every crowded room. 

When I lose something, like a tube of chapstick, I become hyper-fixated on figuring out exactly when, how and where I lost it. I can recall my parents pleading with me as I tore up the couch cushions in exasperation that I could just get a new one. But I couldn’t make them understand that it wasn’t just the lost good itself that gave rise to this distress. It was the principle. The incessant need for order and sense. It wasn’t possible that it just got up, jumped out of my pocket, and walked away. Before I could move forward, I needed to know exactly what had happened to bring me to where I was. Eventually I’ll realize it's not in the couch cushions – that what I’m looking for might really be gone – and reluctantly accept the loss. But that bitter feeling of incompleteness lingers, as though the narrative string of my life is broken and now nothing makes sense. 

Chapstick and gum aren’t the only things I’ve lost and searched for. With that same frantic obsession I lie awake at night combing through the couch cushions of memory, looking under the bed and between the cracks to study ancient conversations, to pull apart moments in time and put them back together. I’ve fantasized about a time machine more times than I can count. Or the ability to read minds. Anything that could give me the answers to make it all complete. I imagine that if I could understand the exact cause and moment for every branch of my life where I lost something dear to me, it would make me miss it less. Like an equation – if I could assign every variable a value, I could solve for X, find the right answer. But what is the answer I’m looking for? The one that tells me I was never wrong? The one that makes reality less permanent? I know that understanding something doesn’t undo it, but I crave it nonetheless, like a distant star promising absolution. 

The need for justification can drain you. There’s too much road ahead to keep looking over your shoulder to catch a glimpse of things you passed years ago. More than that, it is a naive and selfish worldview to assume I warrant a story and explanation every time. People are complicated, and so am I. Sometimes in the jagged mess of connection we get stabbed and hurt each other for reasons beyond tidy words or soothing understanding – that’s part of being a person. But you can’t run your fingers over the scars forever. I think part of moving on is getting over yourself. Your life is all you know – the mistakes and joys and everything in between – but you are not the centre of anyone else's story. They don’t owe you a page of their book, a chapter dedicated to helping you understand what happened, lending themselves to your project of narrative chronology. Not every blank can be filled in. You have to live with the unknown, and make your own lessons from the blanks. But you can also just leave them empty. You can drop the backpack of desperate nostalgia and leave it long behind. Maybe you can come back for it when you are older and wiser, when you’ve seen more sunsets and been to more funerals. 

Maybe you don't have to carry your guilt with you, dragging it over mountaintops and rivers until your back aches and your legs give out. Maybe you don’t have to bury your regrets under dirt and ashes still hot. Maybe the only thing you need to take to the end is you. You can’t spend your life chasing and all the things you miss, lamenting the things you used to have, or you’ll become everything you lost. But you don’t have to run from it either. Let vivid memories ache like a phantom limb, run your tongue over the spot where a tooth used to be, and remember it hurts because it was alive and real and part of you. Nobody looks at the craters on the moon and says it is incomplete – the moon is still full, even with the missing parts. Especially with the missing parts. And so are we.