More About Ghosts...and Biscuits

When I was a very young child, I saw a movie version of Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol and it scared me to death. It wasn't the ghost of Jacob Marley himself that terrified me--the old bearded man looked a bit like Santa and there wasn't anything visually gory or graphic in this black and white classic--it was the idea of dragging your past around like a set of chains. "I forged these chains in life," Marley says.  I don't know if I understood what that meant when I saw this movie as a five-year-old, but I was beginning to figure out that everyone had a past. Previously, I'd thought that God made people in sizes--small, medium & large--and baked us in some celestial oven like biscuits. When my grandmother came to stay with me as my baby brother was being born, she mentioned something about my mother having been a little girl and I got it then. We are all born little--and we all have pasts--and if something goes wrong, that past is going to be heavy and cumbersome and we're going to drag it with us through this life and into the next.

Is it too late to avoid this?  Really?

I want to wrap things up with Mr. Ex and it's not happening. My stomach is in a perpetual state of revolt. (Current fave food that goes down well: wine.) And even worse, I'm beginning to understand that even when (if?) we settle our finances, I will be dragging my past with the man I once considered my one true love around FOREVER.

I forged those chains.