The Two Year Time Frame
I've come across the two year time frame in a number of contexts.
Whenever I've been doing training exercises for counselling or any personal development work or emotional recall exercises in acting, it is usual for the person leading the session to ask the participants not to use any material that is more recent than two years.
It seems that it takes two years for anyone to assimilate any intense emotional experience, to come to terms with it and to integrate it into their being.
Two years ago, I spent one of the best Bank Holidays of my life. I'd just come back from a fabulous holiday at the Edinburgh Festival with Rod and Dale. They came down to London to spend the weekend with me and David, who I'd just met. The four of us got on well together and we went to Cambridge on the Monday. I have a record of that visit on video and a number of photographs.
It was about that time also that David and I began to talk about the future we were never to have together and the future, it later became apparent, he knew was quite impossible given his ill-health.
A lot has happened in those two years.
I've passed from the joy of that occasion, through the pain and anguish of David's illness, through the grief at his death, through the inertia and then frustration of the re-building, eventually to arrive at this summer of regeneration.
If Rod and Dale were there just before the horror started, they remained along side me as electronic companions during the bad times and were there again in April this year when I visited them in Seattle and returned to the UK more like myself than I had been in a long, long time.
I think about David less and less these days. Not because I do not remember him or wish to forget him but rather because his memory is now a part of me. I have neither the unease of denial nor the fervent need to discuss of the recently bereaved. All that happened is now simply a part of me and I'm getting on with the rest of my life.
It would be futile to make comparisons between my present circumstances and my time with David. I do not know whether or not I will ever feel for Ross the sort of feelings that I had for David. And, frankly, I do not care. What we have is what we have and is of its own and brings its own pleasures and contentments. And, inevitably, at some point, will bring frustrations and tension also.
All I can say is that these days I live far more in the present than I have for many months and that I consider the future with more optimism than I felt possible this time last year.
Over the next months, more and more of my time with David will drop out of that two year time frame and, more and more, instead of dominating my thoughts and feelings, that time will become integrated into my being. And the future will bring whatever it brings.