Hello, old friend.
For some reason, I've returned to this place. Spent some time reading some very, very old memories.
I'm at a place in my life right now where I feel like everything is being... rebuilt. After a period of intense and what has felt like complete destruction, then oblivion, I have very slowly started to feel the remnants of a self creep out from the ashes again.
Of course, this isn't my first rodeo in the halls of self-destruction. I've been here before. This journal knows, better than most. It's made me laugh at myself a little ruefully, because all of this past year's horrible, soul-shattering pain that I didn't think anyone could possibly live through, I have lived through. I've thought these same thoughts, felt these same feelings before. Just like now, in 2011 I was so completely convinced that I couldn't make it, that the pain was too much. And of course, I did make it, and I forgot the pain. I will this one too. (Not completely, of course. I built so many dreams into this love, in ways that I didn't that last one).
It's nice to look back at past selves, when you're knee-deep in pain that makes you forget anything and everything else. There was a me who loved a boyband that she thought she'd never move on from, there was a me who felt alive and excited at the prospect of learning new things, there was a me who thought that one boy's rejection meant that I'd never find love or happiness or acceptance again. All of these selves are gone, and were wrong in their own ways. And yet, I still carry parts of them all with me. Arashi, their personalities and their music, are, against all odds, still a pretty hefty part of me. My high school teachers are still a part of me. That Shiv that I loved so deeply eight years ago is still a part of me.
See, it's nice to know these things. It makes me feel like there's a future in which I am happy, regardless of what happens with this current love. There are future selves who will read this entry and chuckle ruefully, and they will maybe have different or the same love(s). But they will hopefully be glad to know that at least at 27, unlike at 19, I wasn't so blinded that I thought that one love was the one, the only I could possibly have. At 27, the knowledge of past (and future) selves is greater and more thorough than that of my younger, more scared selves.
In a weird way, I better understand all these Arashi songs that in high school I found estoric, difficult to connect with, speaking of emotions so deep and profound that I thought the writing was almost a little silly, try-hard even. I remembered loving and resonating with the music and melody of Kotoba Yori Taisetsu na Mono, but wondering if self-conversation could ever be as intense as the kind related in that song, if I could ever feel that deeply. I can only smile wistfully at the memories of those thoughts, because now I know with a certainty that my 17-year-old self couldn't: there are, in fact, things more important than words, and there is nothing greater than (my) love.
I'm grateful for being able to look at these past selves with fondness and affection, and not for the last time, I'm grateful to Arashi. Thank you, boys.