Snow...

Sometimes, no matter how hard you run or try to hide the past catches up with you.

Now if you have a past filled with dark deeds, pacts with the devil, stolen fortunes, that sort of thing then the past catching up with you might be a bit of a problem. Of course if, like me, your life has been a series of ‘nothing much happened’ then the past catching up shouldn’t be of any concern at all.

But then there are the memories and the mind to contend with.

Isn’t the mind marvellous? It allows you to put things away and forget them if you want to. They don’t even have to be bad things. Just things that maybe hurt a little too much, things that you were too tired at the time to deal with - silly things like long ago lies and betrayals, slaps, and slights, and slanders. Best forgotten, best wiped from the database, erased; painted out of the picture like some disgraced Russian cosmonaught found drunk in charge of a space station.

Far easier to store it offline, archive it. The thing is though, along with all the bad the good goes too, locked away in that dusty room marked ‘forgotten’ - gemstones hidden in sealed boxes alongside all the shit. Well, you can’t pick and choose which bits to keep when you shut the door on your past can you? And if you throw away the key, so that you can never be tempted to open it again, it can’t be again unlocked can it?

Snow.

A lock-picker dropped in to see me today, not quite unannounced, but sudden enough so that I couldn’t hide behind the shutters. A bit of good from a time labelled bad, one of those gemstones that got mixed up in the mire. She found me not quite sober and not quite in charge of the space station, but she didn’t seem to mind. A coffee and a chat and some butterflies fluttering in the darkness of that dark, mothy, room.

In the end nothing to be scared of; different but not really changed and not marked with a big ‘R’ for regret - although I’ve some small ‘r’ regrets. It felt fine. I liked it.

I’ve pulled the door to again now, but I’m not going to lock it. I may pop in from time to time and take a look around, look for the shine beneath the shit.

Anyway, it’s on my list and at last I can remember the snow.