Out of your past

How do you react to someone who appears unexpectedly out of your past?

I don't know for sure how often this has happened to me -- not often, if ever. But in general my idea is … well, is it someone I want to see? Do they want something from me? How did this happen? These are all questions or concerns about the person generally, and about what's going on here and now. It's also the kind of reaction I got from, for example, Inga when I first contacted her out of the blue after years.

Turns out there's another way to respond, though, which is to pick up the conversation based on the very last encounter you had with that person, even if it was decades ago. I've seen this at least twice.

When Wife was first diagnosed with lupus she was afraid she didn't have long to live. And one of the things she decided she wanted to do before dying was to straighten out things with an old boyfriend, someone she had been with in a frustrating relationship before she met me. So she looked him up on Google, and then wrote him to tell him about her diagnosis. He wrote back, very concerned about an almost-meeting that she had almost-engineered twenty years before, the last time the two of them were in the same city. And he wanted to make very clear to her that he was absolutely devoted to his wife and she should get any ideas about cheating with him out of her head.

She told me she wanted to write back to say, I'm not trying to fuck you -- I'm trying to tell you I'm dying! But in the end she just dropped it.

Over the last month or two I have looked here and there on Google and finally succeeded in tracking down a current address for a woman named Scarlett, that I used to know in college. So I mailed her. It took a while, but I finally got a reply courteously asking me not to use her work email address any more (but giving me her personal address), and asking why after all this time I was contacting her, … and reminding me of something really shitty I had said in my last letter to her 35 years ago, to which she had decided not to respond.

Wow. I never remembered saying such a thing. But she seemed to remember it like it was yesterday. Of course, she was the one who was shat upon, not me; so I suppose it makes sense that her memory would be a little bit sharper. But still … wow.

And I wonder -- what makes it possible to remember such a specific hurt that long? Is it the nature of the wound, or the nature of the person wounded? In other words, does it say something about Scarlett that she has "held this grudge close to her heart and nurtured it well"? (That was an expression Wife used to describe herself, back when I first met her. I laughed and thought it was a joke. It wasn't.) Or is it just that anyone who had gotten a letter as douchey as the one she quotes from me would remember the sting in exactly the same way? (I have no recollection of writing this letter, but I totally believe it. I was really self-centered back then.)

I don't know the answer. I wish I did.