There’s something perplexing about visiting old places with a new version of one’s self. About interacting with old friends, while you already carry pieces of your new ones. And about getting glimpses of the past (that once seemed like a never-ending present) while you’re already part of the future. To the world, you’re just the same old figure; everyone, somehow, expects you to resume exactly from where you left off. As if your world had been paused while everyone else was busy with their own. As if you’re not allowed to change unless they’re there to witness it happen. Yet you do change, and you only realize it when you go back to those places and talk to those people. You realize it when you don’t laugh at their same old jokes, or feel like they could relate to yours. You realize it when you stop relating to their struggles that were once your very own, then have a hard time explaining how you’re already over everything this fast. You realize it when they refer to something you so obviously used to believe in, just a couple of days ago, not knowing that you might have had a conversation with someone just the night before, and that this conversation has changed everything. You might have managed to see a different side of the world, but they haven’t seen you do it.
Change can happen so fast, faster than one’s own ability to sit back and reflect upon it. Yet, to them, you’ll always be who you’ve always been, and nothing you can say would ever explain that.
March 13, 2017
The things a blank page can do 