What do you do when ghosts from your past darken your threshold?

It’s the call from an ex that you don’t expect. First, incredulity. Then recovery. A stab at politeness, at small talk while all the time thinking, “What the bloody hell? How did you get this number?!”

It’s the social media message from an old friend. Mutually probing. Tentative. Wondering. “Are you the same person I knew all those years ago? Has adulthood drowned the kindred spirit I once knew?”

It’s chance encounters with people who you knew before. Before. And again the small talk. But not before awareness passes between you and you know, you recognise in them the missing of what was.

It’s old diaries, pages musty with age, in longhand script that you no longer use because we type everything these days (gosh, I still love, love, love writing longhand!). It’s gibberish that, at the time, was everything and this time is nothing.

What do you do when something calls an old name that you no longer answer to?

Sometimes, you answer. It might take a while to find the will to answer. There are so many reasons not to. The past is the past. Onwards always, backwards never. We move. You’ve grown past that. etc. etc. But then all of that crumbles in the face of your truth. The truth that the call wakes something buried. Nothing ambitious. Just the faintest of stirs, really. And that’s enough for you to explore, to understand why this moves you, in this way, at this time.

That said, some things are better left dead (dormant, mothballed etc.) Not all calls from the past should be answered or returned. For instance, it is not considered best practice to take calls from your ex. Exes, by definition are unpredictable creatures (i.e. if you had predicted how it would end, they would not be exes because you’d probably have never started). And so why, at this big old age, would you want yet more complexity in your life?