Even A Meteor…

Sometimes, the smallest decisions can make a lasting impact on our lives.

So often, when we’re in the middle of something painful, it feels like a meteor - huge and burning at thousands of degrees, scorching everything around it. It’s hard to see anything except the damage it’s causing.

But eventually, it burns through its fuel. It gets smaller and smaller, and from a distance, it doesn’t seem quite as enormous as it once did. Sure, it still hits the earth. It still leaves a crater. But eventually, life grows around that crater. The landscape changes. The world continues on.

I’ve had plenty of meteors in my life, some bigger than others. That’s just life.

But the thing about craters is that they don’t completely disappear. You can fill them in. Grass can grow over them. Years can pass. But there’s still a mark where something happened.

And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

If we weren’t meant to have memories, I suppose our brains would have worked differently from the start. And as I get older, I find some of those memories getting a little blurrier. Faces fade. Details disappear. Entire stretches of time get reduced to a few snapshots in my head.

But every once in a while, something unlocks one - and suddenly it brings a dozen more rushing back with it.

Like this week.

My kiddo and I are watching a series together. Every Year After. Romance, of course. Broken hearts. Obvious choice.

But it isn’t the story that gets me. Or even the characters.

It’s Sam.

When the older version of him showed up on screen, it felt like someone had opened a door to another lifetime. His eyes, his nose, the eyelashes - all strangely familiar from what feels like a million years ago.

No, I don’t know the actor.

But I once knew someone who looked an awful lot like him.

“That looks so much like my college boyfriend,” I blurted out.

“Do you have a photo, Mom?”

And I realized I didn’t.

I wish I did, if only so I could show her the similarity. But I don’t have one.

That was a time in my life I got rid of most things from, for a million different reasons. It was a season of poor choices, broken hearts and, at least on my part, not being mature enough for the relationship I was in.

So when it was over, I got rid of it all.

The pictures. The reminders. The pieces of that life.

At the time, I think I believed throwing those things away would somehow cleanse my heart and my memory of everything that hurt.

But somehow, I got rid of the good, too.

And all these years later, I have nothing to show my daughter. Nothing tangible to look back on from what was actually a pretty pivotal time in my life.

It was my last relationship before I really had to grow up. Before the career and the bills and building a family. It was the tail end of my teenage years, when life was simpler in ways I couldn’t possibly appreciate yet and sometimes the moment we were living in was all we really had.

There were good times, too.

And I have nothing left to remember them by.

That doesn’t mean I wish my life had turned out differently. I don’t.

We have a good life. We have love and hopes and futures and so much still ahead of us.

But I can love the life I have and still recognize that the lives I lived before this one mattered, too.

And sometimes, it feels strange to realize that an entire chapter of my own story exists mostly in my memory now - and even those pages are beginning to fade.

So I hope, as my kids grow older and have their own meteors, they don’t feel like they have to burn every piece of the past just because part of it hurt.

Keep a picture.

Keep the letter.

Keep something that reminds you not only of how it ended, but of why it mattered in the first place.

Because someday, the fire will be gone. Life will grow around the crater. You’ll become someone you couldn’t have imagined when you were standing in the middle of it.

And you may find yourself years later, sitting beside your kid on the couch, watching some random actor walk across a television screen - and suddenly wishing you had one little piece of who you were back then.

Not because you want to go back.

Just because it was your life, too.

And maybe not everything we move on from needs to be erased.