Standing in a line filled with dozens of people, I wait impatiently at ministry ontario waiting to have my health card photo retaken. Why is the line being help up for over an hour now? ask the person who has been arguing over his photo for 20 minutes. Thank you canada for free health care, but I am perfectly content with keeping the photo I had at the age of 15. Honestly though, how is it remotely possible for one to achieve the amount of fierceness necessary for a piece of photo id at 9am on a Friday? It just does not happen.

I spent my friday doing what I do best…binge watching online television.

Two Marlboro lights an three glasses of wine later, I sit on my deck watching Sex and The City. The day passed by mostly in a blur for it does not feel as if I accomplished that much. I think I say this just about ever year, but I am hoping that I accomplish more with as another birth year approaches.

Saturday afternoon and I once again find myself down by the lake. I’ve been thinking a lot about the rebuilding and representations of ourselves that occur throughout aging. As it may show, I have changed a lot over the course of this blog. I stood on the boardwalk looking out on the cascading lake and I think about all the changes that took place in order to distance myself from the “old me”. When placing it all into retrospect, no matter how much you attempt to change, you cannot entirely escape the past that you have hidden. Think about it in a literary sense, Gatsby attempted to escape his past but it all eventually caught up with him and he died. Moral of the story: don’t escape your past or you will end up being in love with someone who doesn’t love you back for their cheating husbands mistresses husband will end up shooting you…. More or less.

I’ve taken many lengths to escape all that I was, but is that a bright thing to do? I may not have liked all the parts of me, but that just comes with being human. In no book or ancient scroll does it say that we MUST be happy with everything about ourselves. With my birthday upon me (tomorrow), I now have another year where I will probably undergo some more changes. I’m going to title this chapter: The Merge. I will now be attempting to merge together the old and new me….maybe just an adaptation.

Whatever the case may be, I realized that no matter the facade that I put on, how many cigarettes pass through my lungs, or how many drinks I consume, I will still carry around the insecurities of the past. We can try to forget them or we can accept what our pasts have to bear. I think I’m at the point where I might need to rethink some of the bridges I’ve burned. Moral of the entry: no matter how badly the bridge has been burned, there are always shards that can be salvaged.