Letting Go of C

Apparently I have been dragging someone with around with me for twenty five years.

I was not really conscious of it until this week.  All of a sudden this person, whom I had though had long ago moved on, reared their head again in my life.  The reality is of course this person has long ago forgotten me - I can guarantee that.  Yet here I sit with them in my conscious brain as if not a single day has passed.

What do you ask the incoporal:  What are you doing here?  Why are you  still here?  Why will you not let me go?

Oddly enough, they will respond, a sort of ghostly hologram running a preprogrammed message:  I am here because you keep me here.  I cannot tell you why I am here because you cannot tell yourself why I am here.  I cannot let you go because you will not let me go. 

And there the finger goes, right back at me. 

It is a shock, of course, to realize that something buried this deep has been kept there because you wanted it in some way.  Oh, you tried to convince yourself that it was gone, that it needed to be gone, that it should be gone - yet it keeps popping it and suddenly you realize you are cliniging to it with a death grip.

Why?  Because letting go of an old hurt can be the most painful thing of all.

I thought I had let go - years ago.  Uisdean Ruadh and I made an event of it:  everything I had that was involved went into the stove, where we burned it.  Nothing remained, I thought.  Apparently I was wrong - everything important remained.  I just dumped the physical manifestation of it.

How do you complete an action that happened so many years ago?  How do you simply say "Yup.  What I really felt at the time was legitimate.  It was awful, but the feelings were legitimate.  Sometimes people treat people poorly.  It is just the way of it."

I needed the closure. I I guess I was denied it, never having the opportunity to deliver it and so close the gap - and so for all of these years, buried beneath my relationships and my hopes and fears and dreams and fantasies is the C, standing behind and over it all.  The bitter part is that I kept them there. 

So now I need to let go.

Easier said than done, of course.  I have been done this path once before and that apparently was not enough.  I am not sure what the letting go will truly look like, nor is something I think I can rush at this point.  There is simply too much overlaying it at this point for me to pick a time and shout "I am done!"

But I brought them all this way.  I carried them through my life.

And I am the one that will have to let go.