make your past your past.

I have been idle for so long that this sudden onset of activity has left me a bit tired and confused. In a satisfied way, most definitely. The past few days have been full of rehearsal, reading, work, and late nights with friends.

They've also been full of thought. So many things require consideration that I find it strange to fall asleep at night without any number of questions and answers fluttering around my head. They make for interesting dreams, let me tell you.

Agnes of God rehearsals have provided the most rewarding and thought-provoking of those hours in my day. There is so much heaviness in the script, I'm afraid that I won't be able to peel back the necessary layers of Agnes' character and my own emotions to get exactly what I want. I feel so awkward during readings, when I get to a line in the script that instructs me to cry. I don't want to fake it, but I haven't gotten to the point yet where I can feel those emotions acutely enough to create real tears. But my directors seem pleased with the progress, and I know I'm in good hands. And I have more than a month yet until the show goes up in front of an audience, so all I can hope is that in that time I can come up with a performance, a truth, that I can be personally satisfied with. There is so much soul-searching to be had, so much emotion and pain to be uncovered. I hope I'm ready.

The idleness of the past week has allowed me to live in the sheltered present. Oh, I've thought of the past and those people who inhabit it quite a bit. There's a comfortable distance there, between myself and them. I felt so safe. I thought I was ready to face anything.

But then the past came walking into class this afternoon and caused nervous knots to form in my stomach. Then the past hugged me after class ended and I felt so young and bumbling, unable to form coherent and unawkward conversation. Jarring. I forgot that sometimes the past comes back to meld with the present; it was a meeting I was preparing for, but found myself quite unready to face. Thank goodness I've moved from those initial moments of dread that I had felt in the aftermath of reconnection. Someone who knows me so well would not judge me for being so surprised.

And the thing is, my feelings about the past have remained unchanged since the past left me for faraway places. The past can stay at a friendly - if much closer - distance and the both of us will be better for it. Time has given me the gift of looking at the past with an objectivity and rational calm that I did not have before. The past can live in my present if it so wishes. But it can never be my present again.

Because I've moved on. I live in the present. And I look forward to the future without the past holding me back.