Have you ever watched The NeverEnding Story? You know how the book seems to bleed into Sebastian’s life, with him running afoul of frightening taxidermy during an encounter with G’mork.
Today my life is something like that.
Ever since I I first transferred from Blogger to WordPress in the midst of the first NaBloPoMo (a feat I still can’t believe I engineered), I’ve also been moving backwards though the almost 3000 posts that came before, categorizing them into tidy chunks that tell the stories of my life.
I’m determined to at least categorize back into the year 2000 by the end of the month, and in my surge of personal excavation I’ve become firmly entrenched in the “Behind the Music” portion of my life – recording a seminal album while going through a horrific breakup and a nearly deadly illness. Flirting with potential entanglements Oh, and drinking a lot.
That old, unhappy, unsure me seems so alien in the present day. To catch all of the themes in those old posts I’ve had to do more than read them – I’ve had to put myself in their place. How else to remember that I hatched my plot to break up with Selina as an allegory of why I shouldn’t pull an all-nighter?
In the process of getting into character I feel like those old posts have been slowly transforming my present day life. I Trio “Will It Ever Come,” telling the story of how it was written, and then find myself re-reading the post about recording it in the studio. Yesterday I re-read one lamenting that it was hard to tell if you have a fever when you’re under a spotlight, and last night I replayed the experience at our benefit show – half sick and half in-the-moment.
This evening I have a tickle in my chest that’s scarily reminiscent of the beginnings of my legendary bout of bronchitis and pneumonia that I’m about to be rereading.
The coincidence is starting to become frightening, if only because I’ve now crossed the threshold into the worst month of my life – the torturous rehearsal process for Good Woman of Setzuan, nearly failing classes, the depths of my relationship, deaths in the family.
If this was really The NeverEnding Story I would be able to reach back into the plot to shake me out of the stupor. I remember being five and jumping up and down on the bed in my father’s hotel room, screaming unintelligibly along with Bastian as he inserted himself into Fantasia, first interrupting Atreyu’s conversation with Morla, and later by naming the princess “Moon Child.”
Or, maybe I already have – without knowing it – and the only reason that younger me broke free of his darkness was because I am sitting here, happy and healthy, willing him to get on with his life.