Cheers to the Past

It's amazing what a good chat with the past can do for a person. It makes you see the years for the small bits of world that they are. Here I am living my life like the last five years are the only ones I have had. True enough, I consider these five to be the most awake of my twenty six. But it would be an injustice to treat the first twenty one like a long nap. I did live then, too. I had fun. I made friends and mistakes. I laughed and loved and felt.
I call it my past life and I tell it like it's a story. But I think it's time to give due credit to my pre-Never Never land existence.
If I could sit down for a while with my twenty year old self, I would kick my ass into gear. I'd say, "Get out of your house, stop drinking so much beer and open your effing eyes. Have fun while you're here, because you won't be here for much longer." I would also mention that neon nail polish would eventually have a drastic effect on my happiness level and that I should hang in there and not bitch too much, since I would eventually land under palm trees. But maybe that would be crossing that weird butterfly effect line and I would change the course of my life, ending up on the street trying to sell my soul or working in a KFC somewhere, miserable. Anyway.
I wish I had looked around a bit more then. I may have felt like a zombie most of the time, but I wasn't. The people around me weren't, either. I owe my past an apology, I think. I probably owe that to the people who still float around inside the memories of everything I so harshly rejected.
I am sorry that I ran so fast. I am sorry that I gave no thought to leaving. I fell into a quicksand world where no one asks about who you used to be. I needed to start over, which is exactly what I did. But a goodbye was in order and in my rush towards the ocean I forgot to look back at the mountains.
Let's not get confused. Running was what I needed to do. I have argued to people that I was never really running from anything. I was running toward something. Pursuit, not escape. Which, it seems, is both the blue truth and an utter lie.
But if the pursuit is the truth, then I won. I did it. I can not name what I was looking for and I can not tell anyone for sure what it was I found, but I came out breathing more deeply than the shallow Colorado air ever would have allowed.
As has been said a million times and a million ways, if the past hadn't been what it was, the present wouldn't be what it is. So, cheers. To screwy, mixed up, angsty past selves. To the life I really did live then. To the people I knew before I was me. I finally feel like I can say thank you to the life I had for bringing me to the one I'm living now.