Held Ground

Stillness in mystery. Hold the line.

Edges

The past does not ask to be made gentle.

I find a relief in simplifying the past—taking what was complicated, alive, and uneven and smoothing it out until it fits the shape of who I am now. I sand the memory down until I can run my hands across it without splinters. I blunt the edges so they no longer draw blood. I make it clean. I make it legible. And it helps. The pain recedes. The sharpness goes. The ache becomes manageable. It becomes something I can carry without bleeding on everything I touch.

But something else goes with it. The warmth fades. The intensity thins. What once had weight loses its mass. What once had texture becomes too smooth to matter.

I know why I do this. There is safety in stories that behave. There is safety in memories that stop making demands, in a remembered past that no longer argues with the reality of the present. But as the years begin to pile up, and that remembered past outweighs the potential future, I don’t know if I can bear that cost anymore.

The past needs its edges. It needs its reckless parts. It needs the places where it pressed too hard and asked too much. The memories that count are not gentle. They aren’t perfect. They are alive because those moments weren’t gentle or perfect. They had heat. They surprised me. They cut me in places I didn’t know could still be reached. Those aren’t flaws—they are the proof.

So now I try to let the memory keep its grain. I let it catch when I handle it. I don’t rush it into usefulness or flatten it into wisdom just so I can say I’ve moved on. This isn’t about refusing healing or enshrining pain—it’s about refusing erasure. I can live with the sharp edges. I can let myself bleed.

What mattered should still be able to cut me. Otherwise, it didn’t really matter at all.

Rob Wyatt

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12 responses to “Edges”

  1. Beautiful expression about experience. And in our human condition, about experience and time. I think you’ve discovered a key many people don’t. I always wonder in these moments about the ignorance is bliss statement and hope that it’s false. 😋
    This reminds me, when people have said there’s a sadness in the aurora around me, and makes me thing maybe it surrounds us. And is mislabeled.

    Lovely post and is so very you

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    • Jung said that it is always better to know than to not know – that doesn’t equate to “better” in terms of it being painless though does it? Maybe that aurora is the mass and grain of the past that we carry with us? Thank you for your comment. Your thoughts always mean so much to me.

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      • Jung did say that. And that was why the tongue face, even though I might think about it and observe it, I could never truly. imagine it being better to not know. My life is spent seeking to ‘know’.
        No clue about the sad Aurora really. And you’re quite welcome.

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  3. I’ve never seen this tension articulated so clearly, the need to soften the past to live with it, and the grief of what disappears when we do. The idea that edges are proof, not flaws, really struck me. Thank you for letting the memory keep its grain.

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    • I spend a lot of time being struck by the physicality of memory and emotion. That its not just silent flat featureless files that sit inside our mind. They have edges and they are sharp and it’s the memories that are the sharpest that matter most. Thank you for taking the time to comment.

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