Walking through the streets of Texcoco today I could not stop thinking about how much I despise the place and how Mexico City is superior in every respect to the dingy, fat, dirty streets of the periurban hinterland city that is 40 km East of my new home. But it was my home. For too long. Self-blame starts to surface as I think of how I stayed too long, like a lover afraid to leave an abusive partner. I convinced myself it was not only habitable but good and beautiful.
But was it all as bad as I remember? An acquaintance recently challenged the basic nature of narrating the past.
We (or at least I) tend to narrate unhappy spells of the past by major events. Maybe your parents got a divorce and then you were in an accident and afterwords your partner dumped you. Sucks, no? The problem with this narration is that the side stories get lost by the bitter and bigger points of your story. You overlook the good that happened during the same time period: the great connections with friends or co-workers; taking up an instrument; or learning to bake bread.
There is no doubt that the streets of Texcoco are haunted with my past, some parts quite hellish, but the past was not all as bad as you and I might think.
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