Secretly I’ve been pretty pissed the entirety of this trip, trying to get away and rebuild some connection with snowboarding and doing so without my brother. It hasn’t been the least bit easy. Sure, when I am riding around, my mind is forced to focus entirely at the task at hand, which is why I mostly enjoyed the sport in the first place.
But what really chafes is all the connected memories of this place. Each little menu item, or a store you forgot about, or maybe a run or chair that reminds you of the loss you have endured in these last three years.
Then to top it all off, you have the new memories being made and all the cool stuff that we have seen and done this last week, and you just get pissed. What possibly could have been so bad that you didn’t want to stick around for this?
I’ll be sitting in the passenger seat in the snowcat and be thinking to myself how very frickin’ cool this is and then have it book-ended by two raw emotions. One is sadness because I wish I could be sharing this with David. The other is frustration because at that exact moment, when it should be about me, it becomes about David again, and somehow that moment has a slight blemish when it was perfectly mine and in my right to own entirely.
You feel yourself in a constant state of giving up a piece of yourself at every new experience. You are always leaving something behind when you run into something familiar.
Today is a POW day, and I am about to suit up and run into the back-country. And here I am, already wishing DP was upstairs, his little intense face getting set to scare the crap out of ourselves, zipping around in his snow pants that make that oh-so-familiar sound of snow gear crinkling as you wander around trying to find your goggles. Well… at least I got it over with, “Maybe I can be a little more selfish now.”
