Part II

Saturday, April 17, 2010

It hits me like a brick and panic starts deep and low in my gut, climbing upwards, invading my lungs, tugging my shoulders, scaling my throat until finally conquering my mind.

I don’t remember Eugene anymore.

Come to think of it, I don’t feel like I have much a past beyond the last six weeks. All of my memories seem to be in third person and not omniscient. What is this?

I’ve been reading pretty heavily lately and investing myself in these stories without realizing just how much they pull me out of my present. I have no past, I’m out of touch with my present and living entirely in fiction. The fiction I weave is a far off future, thinking only of infinite, and what’s not my own are the tales of Vonnegut and Steinbeck for the time being. It’s nice to get lost in a book from time to time but this is getting ridiculous. It’s time to cease daydreaming and snap back to hear and now. There’s a time and place for the future and it’s called the future. I seem to have forgotten that it’s wise to just resign to the flow of life to carry me through and go with it, enjoy it, and learn from it.

It’s odd to feel so distant from my memories though and I don’t know what can or will be done to reconcile this. I’m out of touch with almost everyone that I’ve ever known before this last month besides my father. I remember a skinny guy who used to live in a cold apartment, bundled up in coats, cooking quesadillas and watching Blazer games but that doesn’t seem like me. Even as I spent the last two days in an open-air room with only natural light, sitting around nothing better than a bunch of plastic lawn tables in plastic lawn chairs listening to people speak a language I failed to keep up with, nothing seemed foreign or out of the ordinary. Yep, I’ve crossed the threshold where life at home has become more foreign to me than life here. It wasn’t smooth or quick and the differences weren’t subtle, but sure enough it has happened and I’ve identified it. What’s it like to drink water straight from the tap? What’s it like to wake up and not be veiled by a sagging mosquito net? What’s it like to be anonymous again and be able to just do what I want, be who I want, and not draw stares at all times? It’s going to be hard to go “home” after all…

Speaking of which, I haven’t changed my plane tickets yet but it’s looking like I’m under two months now.