One Year Later

It has been one year since I had left home: a humid, crowded airport; the dogs in the street; Diwali crackers like machine guns; hell swarms of mosquitoes; the fortress in the sea; the Tower of Silence, the city being built; the cheer at the end of the powercut; desperate lessons; war; the goat in the taxi seat in the rush to depart; struggle; order; a bicycle and a coat; Nudelhaus; the transformation of places; the toy ship I meant to buy for Fredrick; discovery of Lübeck and the terrible airport meal; beautiful, lost Stockholm; the empty haunted Dance Museum; shelter; the frost fields; my German friend apologizing for World War II; a bottle of glögg for the Minister of Finance, and his run-ins with the Russian secret service; miscalculated currencies; falling off the planet; hunger; Eva and the pogrom; a true friend; a bus into the inkwell; RIX; the first city to which I had ever returned; the first home to which I had ever returned; a long walk through Sugar Hill in the winter night; "Oh my god!"; the high-pitched whistling language in the alleys of Harlem; poverty; joining the circus; the birdhouse; Noel as I walked Broadway north; heartbreak; rediscovery; a new forest in the woods; Diego; Bastille Day; love in the mountains; fears for my family; the transformation of places (2); a secret city; Q58; losing grapes and strawberries at the Astoria Pool; autumn together; a family business.

I told my aunt that for the last few years, the perception of the flow of time has become something that I am much more mindful of. When you are 10, another year is 1/10th of your life, months are eternities. Now a year feels the way 3 months used to in the speed in which it passes by. She laughed, saying, "Wait til you're 60!"

It has taken the full year to understand, to be able to gain perspective on, any of the things which have happened over the past year. I don't know if that perception of the passage of time helps mull over things faster to learn their lessons. Maybe it makes it feel like less time, even. All I know is that while it feels like it was so recently that I was boarding airplane and disappearing, I can hardly comprehend the compression of those events into 10 years much less the one. It feels like just months ago that I was in Romania, much less Bombay, much less Amsterdam.

That said, this next year shall not spare me from, I'm sure, just as much new adventure. Let's just be done for good with the heartbreak though, okay? I think I can write good enough stories without that angle. I'm looking forward to writing some with happy conclusions.

And war, too. No more of that.