Past Lives

It’s funny how the echoes of relationships long past still ripple forward into how I am with Fella. I suppose what I mean is how they have influenced me; it’s not anything he has done.

It isn’t conscious; like a pinball I’ve been bounced around – sometimes scoring points, sometimes dropping out of view. I think I’m lucky that I’ve not been adversely affected by the things I’ve experienced. Or at least not to the point I react to things because of some negative conditioning; behaving a certain way out of fear, for instance. Rule 5 is still the tops!

Coming out is still absolutely the best thing I’ve ever done. I was reminiscing with Fella at the weekend that once when I was 15 or so I was very late home one night; a guy I was at school with and I got off at the same bus-stop in the little rural village I grew up in and, to cut a long story short, ended up getting off with him in a field not far from there. I wondered then how different my life might have been if, at the very height of this titillating experimentation, I hadn’t put my hand in a cow pat.

If only I’d been good at being bad!

Anyway, gentle reader, what I mean to say is that my thoughts are sometimes tinged with worry that it is wrong that the condoms I buy are International’s preferred brand; that the music I like I was introduced to by this guy; the places I’d take Fella I was introduced to by that. Etc etc...

But then, does it really mater? Where I laugh with you, cry with you, love you or hate you will always depend as much in me as you; on whether my train was late and what I had for lunch. And my life experiences. So surely it is better to learn and grow from past experience than deny it and being on tenterhooks the whole time about reliving past mistakes.

Of course it may be easier for some of us to assimilate and learn from mistakes than others. I ran into a past assignation of mine at the local supermarket and he seemed remarkably uncomfortable (I like to at least say hello and am not embarrassed to treat them as I would any casual acquaintance. Sex doesn’t mean you can’t have manners after all). It was only I realised he was with his girlfriend that the penny dropped.

So: being out, proud, and slightly naïve is a good way to be. If you’re with the right guy!