If it's something significant that happened in my life, the tendency is that I'll always be aware of its anniversary when it comes around. Sometimes they're good anniversaries. But most of the time the bad ones overshadow the good.
If you have read my book Keeping the Tryst, then you are aware that there is a date that I spend some time on: May 16th, 1986. That is the day of the cruelest betrayal that has ever happened to me.
I was just over twelve years old, still a child but on the cusp of the unfolding of youth's great transformation that leads ultimately to adulthood. What happened that day destroyed much of that experience for me. I will never know what I could have become had that innocence not been taken from me at just that moment in my life. Not just physically and emotionally, but spiritually also. Yes, especially spiritually.
It was the sort of thing that burns itself deeply into one's chronological awareness of their life. And so it is that May 16th became a day upon which I harbored dark and dread thoughts. Especially every ten years. I can tell you precisely where I was and with whom, on the tenth anniversary (fortunately I spent much of that day in the company of my two best friends at Elon, being with them always cheered me up).
There was the twentieth anniversary, in 2006. I threw myself into making a bunch of blog posts that day. Working on this blog has long given me an escape at times. I had just finished reading The Da Vinci Code and had expressed how disappointed I was with that book (seriously, what WERE we supposed to be afraid of it for?). And my wife at the time - the person who I will forever be torturing myself for the hell that I put her through - helped me get through that day.
Ten years later, on May 16 2016, the memories came back, again. At the time I was in the midst of trying to motivate myself toward getting the house I'd grown up in ready to sell. My family was insistent that we had to be rid of it and that meant that I would have to find a new home. In the end I went above and beyond that and left town completely for good and that was how it came to be that my dog and I spent a year traveling across America looking for a new home. But even so, May the 16th cast its shadow, and for much of that day I felt triggered: by memory, by uncertainty, by betrayals of their own accord. And then May 17th dawned and the past receded with it, and I was free for another year or ten.
So a week ago today was May 16th, 2026. Forty years ago since that day at the Christian school where I had been a student of for over half my life. Forty years since the day that my earthly being had been nearly completely ruined.
And somehow, when May the 16th of this year came about... I didn't notice.
It was something that had not grasped my attention at all. Had not registered in any way whatsoever. It was just another day, one more Saturday along with all the others that came before it. I woke up, played with my dog, did a little work on my iPad, called up friends and spoke with them for awhile, and later that night I had dinner and watched a horror movie on the local affiliate of my favorite nostalgia channel. There was nothing inordinately wrong with May 16th, 2026.
It didn't hit me until late last night that I had completely missed the anniversary. That this was the first year when I had been totally free of it.
How did THAT happen?!?
Maybe it is that I've been so fixated on the various crises happening in my life right now. I'm desperate for real work, running on fumes, have been hit with one new desperation after another come each new day... there hasn't been time to fixate on the arrival of any anniversary. And maybe that's the way it's *supposed* to be for any such occasion.
I'm wondering though, if maybe writing and publishing my book had something to do with it.
That was an especially difficult and hard thing to have shared in the pages of Keeping the Tryst. I'll never forget what it was like to write about that. But ultimately I braced myself and sat down and pushed forward through all the pain and agony, until there was more or less the words that you find in Chapter 7. There was a lot of pausing and stepping away from the keyboard during that composition, and times when I had to collect myself. I never ceased completely though. And it took me a few false starts but in the end I had plunged into the darkness and brought to light nearly forty years of accumulated turmoil, knowing fully well that it would be something that I would be sharing with others, come of that whatever may.
Perhaps doing that has been a healing thing for me. I think it's altogether possible.
It's also possible that this was the first "every ten years" anniversary that has come about since I finally found myself able to talk to the authorities about what happened when I was twelve. Granted, that came 34 years after it occurred. And as the lead detective told me at the time there was little chance that my coming to them would end up in prosecution. After thirty-four years people have moved on, they've also passed away. I told him that I didn't care if nothing more came of it. That I was just glad to finally be telling someone about it. That was a HUGE relief that came over me, that I was at last able to do that. I don't think that I would have been able to write so openly about it, had I not met with the detectives at the sheriff's department in Wentworth that day. I'm forever going to be thankful for them that they listened to me and that they at least showed real concern and sympathy.
However it came to be, May the 16th of this year came, and went, and I was none the wiser or lesser for it. It was just another day, albeit one with its own problems that I am trying my best at the moment to overcome. But for once the memories of a day four full decades in the past did not arise on schedule to haunt me.
I'm going to mark that down as a great triumph. One worth noting, and celebrating, and rejoicing in.
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