I've been back five weeks and it still feels as if I'd never left, turning my back on my friends and family at the departure gate without the obligatory hugs, and the obligatory tears. Those five months now seem like a distant memory; the things that happened don't seem to have been very real at all. I remember the day I touched down after my hedonistic 3 week journey to the east coast--it felt like I'd come home. And lately, I've been coming around to the idea that perhaps I left my heart there. Today, I indulged the fantasy of making that journey down Mounts Bay Rd. Startlingly, it didn't feel like home anymore. How I made that transition from point A, where I had settled in a foreign land and started living not simply as a sojourner, to point B, where I have since moved on and can no longer conjure up and revisit that same ease and comfortable familiarity, is beyond me. I am still unable to comprehend the transience of life and relationships. The truth of a sentiment is always predicated upon a single moment. I love you, I miss you, this is home, these are all statements that mean something only in the moment of its utterance. Even words which are immortalised on a page or on a screen cannot capture that accompanying sentiment: not for long, not for long at all. The implication of this for mankind is that we have to struggle. It will be hard work to constantly renew the intensity of the moment, if only so that we can maintain that fidelity to what we say. That talk is cheap is not a good enough excuse to buy our way out of culpability to others, and to ourselves. Yet to commit ourselves to the moment is to perhaps deny ourselves the capacity to grow beyond what is defined by the present. Where is the stable middle ground that I can straddle? Sometimes I don't know anymore.

posted by beautiful at 10:09 am