I Took a Trip to the Foreign Country of my Past

I’ve just got back from a delicious jaunt to Italy with my fiancé. Well, mostly delicious—it’s been a year since we spent 24 hours in each other’s exclusive company, so there were edges to shave off. Anyway, holiday arguments by the by, there was another layer to the trip, as I spent days unexpectedly walking through the footsteps of my past. I didn’t do a past life regression or anything woowoo, instead I booked a hotel far closer than I had realised to a place I had once known well, leaving me literally retracing steps made fifteen years ago.

Unless you’re still with your childhood sweetheart, residing in your hometown and progressing along a linear career, you’ve most likely spent some years following a totally different life trajectory to the plane you’re currently travelling on. Whether that was through a job or a city, or building a home with a different partner, you have sailed a different ship and seen the same world from a strikingly different vantage point. From time to time, something will reach out to you, like a ghostly hand around your gullet and pull you back into that different life, giving you a shadowy glimpse of that other version of yourself. It can be sweetly sentimental and wrap you up in a wave of nostalgia, or it can be arrestingly traumatic, reminding you of times you wish to hell and back you could forget. It can of course, also be an unsettling sliding door mixture of the two. 

This holiday took me back to land I had once crisscrossed artlessly. I glanced at government offices where I had once registered my intent to live out my days so very differently, passed road signs and landmarks which still mark the blurry coordinates of my recollections. As I lay in my hotel bed with my lover of nearly a decade beside me, it was impossible not to let my mind wander to the same place in another time. It took me half an hour to remember the name of the beautiful fattoria ten miles away, where thirteen years ago almost to the day, I was wed to a life that withered into arid dust. I couldn’t help but Google it, searching for images to confirm its existence, as if my old life was there, just over the hills, the guests in their garb, that future still vivid, not twisted as it was into nothingness. 

Sometimes when I look back at my erstwhile life, I’m hit with existentialist angst because the artist formerly knew as Katherine Ormerod just doesn’t exist anymore. She is so distinct from the woman I am today, so distant as to not even resemble a cousin. Did it even happen? Hard to say as I burnt the photos. But just to be abundantly clear, I harbour no desire to return to that time, nor the mistakes I knew I was making. The stream my life has rippled into is healthy, deep and bountiful. I changed my luck or at least luck stood in my way and didn’t allow me to pass. But I don’t know whether I will ever be able to bury the bones of that other life completely. When my memories cut through the fabric of worlds, and sit tart on my tongue like last night’s vodka, they can feel impossible to scour. Like any kind of grief, mementoes of a broken heart run bottomless in your marrow.

One of my greatest fears of growing older is succumbing to dementia. I watched my Nan, full of life and guidance delivered back to her past by the disease. At night she would wake terrified of the man sleeping beside her, the husband she had forgotten. As her youthful memories tore into her present, she lost contact with the woman she had become. I’m scared that one day I too will return to that girl I once was; that I’ll misplace my true love, that my mistakes will once again become my reality. Will I always know that old life was ephemeral and was destined to give way to the real one? Or will they, one day, become muddled in a mind steering a body that has lived too long for it?

I often struggle to find compassion for myself today as my grown-up, more sensible self; it’s almost impossible for me to extend it to my younger incarnation and the obviously false moves she made. Even in the moment, I knew so many things were wrong and yet they came to pass. Regrets, I’ve had a few. 

But then again, too few to mention. 

Plans are now afoot for my second wedding and my fiancé and I sat in bed hiding from the blazing sun out on the tiled terrace, scribbling notes on hotel letter-headed paper, divvying up responsibilities in magenta-leaded pencil. Booze sourcing in his column, chair hire in mine. I know what’s important and what is decidedly not. I know my own terms and that’s partly because it’s not my first rodeo. Experience is always a gift, even when it flattens you in an enduring way. Innocence succeeded by wisdom brings an acceptance that there are some things in life which are lost for good. But these losses also leave traces on the everyday—they’re in the vinaigrette I was taught to make by my mother-in-law which graces nearly every table I cook for, in the country hamlet pubs I know like the back of my hand, in the songs which form my personal catalogue. Earlier in the summer my parents introduced my fiancé to an album which he has been playing as we’ve driven through winding European roads. One of the tracks was the opening dance at my first wedding. I decided to not let it cheese grate on my heart, in fact, I chose not to even mention it. Sometimes a tchotchke is worth the momentarily displacement.

You might have heard me refer to the patchwork of love, the tapestry of life we all build, stitched together with all the hopes, joys and heartaches we weather and then absorb, nudging us further and further down the lifeline indelibly inscribed into your right palm. We are all products of our pasts, the drive to get over them is futile. Like most women of very almost 40, I have a hinterland and there are mysteries inside me which will never be unravelled. Sometimes we pull at the strings of our patches and we find the seams still tender. Other times we can’t find the join no matter how closely we scrutinise the cloth. The idea that you can’t move forward until you have hermetically sealed the door behind closed is so misleading. There will always be tendrils connecting you to the way you were, no matter how unfamiliar that might one day be. It can take a lot of courage to look back and maturity to forgive yourself—maturity which I hope is waiting for me in the printed patches yet to come.