A still from one of my favorite TV series “Fringe” with people trapped  and frozen in an amber quarantine

Johnny and I have been watching Fringe together, but from opposite sides of the world. I really love that show and it tickles my imagination, especially all the philosophical elements.

As we were watching the episodes where people have been frozen in time inside the amber quarantines due to the overlapping of an alternate Universe, I was thinking about how I wish I could do that with my past, just trap it all in amber and there would be no way for me to reach it  – or for my past to ever reach me. I think I have to create my own amber quarantine, inside my mind.

I’ve tried to run away from my past, I’ve tried to block it out, I’ve even had some suicidal thoughts at times (don’t worry, I would never surrender to those thoughts) when the past has come too close to my present moment, but it’s impossible to escape it and trying to escape it doesn’t make me feel at peace. It’s just a desperation of not feeling like I’ve had closure. PTSD is not easy to live with, and at times it can be confusing to live with the past as a shadow to every passing moment.

You can never run away from the past – but at the same time the past is no longer part of reality. It is merely a collection of used up time, memories, words, feelings, actions that once was part of reality but now gone. The only way my past could ever reach me is in the way I allow it to exist in my thoughts. I make it real, I break the laws of reality when I visit it through my pain and the vicious memories.

I love the quote: “Nothing controls you, you control nothing” – it is a good reminder of how my past has no power over me, here and now, in this very moment and that I can never go back and change anything. People from my past can return, familiar situations can be duplicated, but I am a different person now – I am not the same person I was back then. Today I would not accept the things I once accepted, I would not love the people I once loved – I would not even start the fights I once started. It wasn’t worth it. None of it. Not the love stories, the passionate affairs, the tragic warfare, the silences, the stupid strategies to prove I was right and not failing. Who cares about all that? Who was I trying to prove all that for anyway? Why was my attitude that everything would either ‘make me or break me’? Why did I take so many risks when there were no rewards?

My past is not only a collection of dead time and vivid memories of old mistakes, it is also a collection of questions and they are keeping my past alive. I’m like a restless ghost haunting my own past – asking ‘why, why, why?’. I have to accept that there are no answers and that the only question to ask is  ‘how, how, how?’ – how I want my life to be, who I want to be, and how I want my future to look. That is an exciting question. The why is only loaded with confusion and pain.

I’ll put that inside of the amber quarantine as well.

I love how I am always rescued by movies and TV series somehow. They trigger something positive in me, and I can’t count all the moments where a line or a scene has made me moved forward in my thoughts. It’s odd but nice. And it makes me a nerd, but that’s ok. Because I am sharing all these moments with another nerd. We speak ‘nerdish’ and it makes me feel really good. It makes me feel loved.

Time to put my past in an amber quarantine. I’ve got stuff to do.

And oh, I just love the Fringe title song, here is an extended version: