Today I finally completed reading Our Secrets are the Same. Still those final chapters brought forth ire and consternation within me. But I think I am finally getting better at shedding it as quickly as it comes. It does me no good to hold onto it, letting it fester and gnaw away at me. I had hoped to finish reading the book before 2026 began, but lo…other things got in the way. Also, I had to be careful to read it at times when I felt more capable of letting it wash over me.
Last night, somewhere in the periphery he was in my dreams. I recall an encounter with Bruce Findlay during the dream. It was a brief exchange, a lot of it I don’t recall, other than the general bewilderment of Bruce STILL being pro-Glesga twins. Within my dwam, I was recalling the way he was described by someone as “all too eager to reap the rewards” of being the band manager for approximately 12 years. Alas, that was the only bit of the dream I recalled upon waking (the bladder was a knocking, as usual). Bruce was as perplexed as I was bemused and aggrieved. We agreed to disagree without the words being said…we just parted ways.
Back to the book. How astounding I found the one wee section that stopped me in my tracks. If you watched my vlog post prior to Christmas, bless you! If you didn’t and you can muster it, just watch it from the one hour mark, those final several minutes. There’s a bit where I talk about my grieving and coming to terms with the loss of my mum. And…there is a passage in the book. I had only just read it today and it knocked me sideways. He said (I’ll have to be careful about quoting passages here, I’m sure), “I used to feel guilty when my mum passed away about not being sufficiently mournful […] there was a huge sense of relief that it was over, because it was the worst thing imaginable to see my parents in pain.”
Oh, fuck.
It’s like a flicker of humanity in someone that I now feel like I endlessly vilify. That thin line between love and hate. The pages before it I am arguing points and shaking my head in disagreement and disbelief. And then there was that…like the passage earlier on where I never considered how heavily that “shoulder of responsibility” of the eldest son was on him and how it felt thrusted upon him. My heart aches in those moments. It aches for that silly, romantic, rose-tinted, pedestal-towering, unabashed adoration I had for him. And then two pages later, the disillusionment, the resentment, the admonishment returns. And I keep turning the pages to try and just get it done with. So I can say I’ve read it and put it away in a box never to have to deal with it again. To consider in the future selling it on, or perhaps just to keep it filed away as the final memento of a decade that meant EVERYTHING to me at so many points but now feels like some kind of “lost weekend.” John Lennon in his May Peng and Harry Nilsson period. Nilsson, Schmilsson.
So, it is done and the chapter is closed. What’s next? Nobody knows…
Poetry, you arse!