I woke this morning to the sound of an incoming text from my next door neighbor. Ana Sofia is a lovely young doctor who has started her residency at a nearby medical school. I have become friends with her and her mom and dad while she was moving in, providing a little help and advice along the way, and housesitting her plants (“my babies”) while she was visiting home, and so on.

Ana Sofia had texted me the night before while I was out. She needed help with her soda stream, which I had been able to get working last week for her mother. “I’m on my first trauma shift….wish me luck!!!”, which of course I offered, and told her that I wanted to hear how it went tonight, when I come over to get the obstinent soda stream running.

I smiled a little ironically to myself at that point. Trauma in one form or another has pretty much dominated my life over the past nine months. My father in law’s rapid decline; his death and funeral; the increasing estrangement that came to dominate my marriage; its violent end, and the physical injuries I endured at the hands of someone I loved; and the aftermath, as she sought to place the blame and burden of our separation solely at my feet.

Yes, trauma has dominated much of my life, although I suspect in a very different way from that experienced by Ana Sofia today.

Yesterday, I went to an afternoon summer party with a companion. It was in what had once been my hometown. Realizing we were going to arrive almost an hour early, we stopped for a coffee at Starbucks. It placed me less than a quarter of a mile from my old home.

I suppose that triggered something in me.

Our conversation turned to the estrangement, and to the confusion and resentment that I still occasionally feel over the way I was treated. It remains difficult to comprehend how someone who had been so loving only ten months earlier could seemingly turn off that spigot of affection overnight. The sudden disappearance of location sharing on her phone. The unusual trips away. And how each of those trips appeared to be followed by another dramatic shift in her attitude toward me.

Taken together, those events—and other pieces of evidence—led me to wonder whether the influence of an external party had played some role in what ultimately transpired.

But it was, and remains, only a theory. An attempt to make sense of something that offers so little closure despite having turned every aspect of my life upside down.

As I recounted these thoughts, my companion emphatically interrupted me, frustration written on her face..

“You need to focus on the present and the future.”

She was right.

In truth, I have been doing exactly that, and I have made enormous progress. Nothing I can do or say can alter the past. But I still need to find a way to make peace with it if I am to live fully in the present and embrace the future I hope to build.

Being so close to my old home felt like encountering a nasty skip in the groove of my life. Like the stylus catching an almost invisible flaw while playing one of the most beautiful passages on a favourite record, dragging the music back to the same note again and again until you finally lift the needle.

Do you clean the record and hope the flaw was only dust? Do you simply flip it over and begin listening to Side Two? Or do you put the album back in its sleeve, reach for something entirely different, and discover music you have never heard before?

I don’t yet know the answer.

Perhaps healing isn’t choosing one over another. Perhaps it is learning which records are worth cleaning, which are worth putting away, and which no longer need to be played at all.

Trauma has a way of trapping us in the same groove until we finally make peace with it. I know that, sooner or later, I have to lift the needle.

We went on to my friend’s party, and for a while those thoughts quietly receded into the background as we enjoyed good company and easy conversation.

But this morning they returned.

Not with the same intensity as before, but with a quiet reminder that I still have work to do. Not to rewrite the past, but to stop allowing it to dictate the soundtrack of my present.

I hope Ana Sofia’s own shift is a gentler one than mine has been.