We have a good deal of time available to us here. While we work (job dependent) anywhere from fifty-four to eighty hours a week, we are able to skip many of the time-consuming portions of life off-continent. There is no commute greater than a half-mile walk (most are no greater than a couple hundred feet), meals are prepared and cooked for us, cleaning is done weekly as part of the work day, we have no dependents immediately with us, and our personal possessions to care for are few.

Barring emergencies and broken equipment, when we finish up with work, we are immediately done and on our own recognizance sans responsibilities. This leaves plenty of time to think.

Add a ratio of ten women to fifty men in the winter isolation, and it becomes easy to not lose time to dating or the building of a relationship.

Casual dating is weighed differently here as we are all working and living shoulder to shoulder for the next six months. Relationships are similar. Romance moves at a curious speed over the winter, often more carefully than it does stateside, and definitely not in the hormone-fueled, camp counselor drama style of the summer season. Not everyone acts in this regard, but stable friendships carry more weight than casual risk.

Sans dating and/or love, however, and with the time available that we have, it becomes easy to step into the past and look at former lovers, to analyze and theorize, to play the “where did I go wrong” game. When I slip into that mindset, it never ceases to amaze me how different not only I am, but how different my former partners are. It’s intriguing to look at their lives (those whom I’ve stayed in touch with) and where our paths diverged to where they are now.

There have been scars, healed now into interesting characters, and marks of the good kind, those that leave you stronger, more wise, more gentle and patient. There are moments of all manner that still hold a laugh, a wicked smile, or wincing pain. There are thoughts which lead to phone calls and the simple art of sharing that which you still can, of sharing the lives and memories you built together, and the feeling, unlike any other, the mix of respect, distance, nostalgia, lust, regret, and love all tied into the last few seconds before hanging up the phone.

There is silence too, of the nature needed to move beyond difficulties not worth overcoming, hard-fought lessons in forgive and forget, with the former still a work in progress. A silence more difficult than the myriad emotions left in friends turned lovers turned friends. A path not easy but one which the feet and the gut know is the right direction.

So what’s the point of all of this esoteric rambling? Just that of looking back, of remembering and smiling at all the good and all the bad and the fact that I’m still here, still capable of love and hope, still laughing, and still dancing (any takers?). That of gratitude, for those I’ve been able to share the closest of human connection with, for those I still love, and for all the parts of the man that I am now that come from my past.

We certainly weren’t perfect, we certainly didn’t last, but we wrote our own unique story, left our marks on each other, and left our marks on the world.

And that is a thought that I can sleep on.