time travel

Life advances in chunks when you are not careful enough. A new career, a new home, a new human being, these enter my world more obtrusively than changes used to. I am less reflective, or maybe less able to be. My writing sits in 2011, my opinions in some similar amber from almost a decade before then...but I am still tired somehow. The children make a damn fine excuse, but somewhere in the folds of my guilt I know I am just as I always have been: lazy, cautious, a little timid...

I reflect most often on older adventures. I love my current ones, but as time turns memories to self-perpetuating myths, discarding the pain and fear that once came with them, they turn into soft nostalgia, warming but heavy. The sadness of nostalgia has always somewhat fascinated me, it is a concept that can only be explained in anecdote: the sinking feeling in my stomach when I think of that long walk with mom on a fall afternoon when we found the candy in her favorite black coat, the coat dad would accidentally ruin later that night (dry clean only) and I realized for the first time in some weird materialistic way that we often can never go back again and that even trivial moments can be important.

We can never go back again.

I would. I think I would. I would return to Southeast Asia, perhaps just for that day in the torrential rain, dodging the larger mud piles on a sprint home from language class, slipping everywhere, smelling the life of life mixing around me...it is indescribable, except to say that I love it and miss it, and yet am saddened by its impermanence.

I tell myself to hug those boys because soon they will be men, with their own adventures that will no longer include me. Hug them while you can. But they want to play XBox, or head down to hill to play ball...I call my dad, we swap conspiracy theories, and we are both sad somewhere deep in there about things unsaid and undone, things we cannot return to even if we would. I think we would.