Old Wounds

Maybe this is why I write: because when you create the world, you can control what happens in it. Like everybody else, I am endlessly discovering all the things over which I have no control. I couldn't save my mother -- not that in the end she wanted to be saved, but still, I really tried. And I still can't change the past.

I can't escape it, either. I volunteered to do a good thing for someone with whom I don't have a close relationship, but who is dear to someone dear to me. In doing so, I was presented with a perspective on an event that happened almost 20 years ago -- and yet it still has the power to piss me off, and not just for me, but for my mother and sister, too. Doesn't this stuff ever go away?

Maybe that's why I still think F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby has the best ending I've ever read:

"Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes befores us. It eludes us then, but that is no matter -- tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther, and one fine morning...

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."