Backwards in Time

I've been thinking a lot lately about happiness--what is it? where does it come from? how do we know when it is real? I don't really have an answer. All that I know is that it's a momentary feeling, for me, it's quite easily affected by the weather. (Thank God for Seattle's summer sun...)

I wonder a lot about the "If someone had told me that in ___ years I would be _____ doing ____" conundrum. Lately, when I wake up in the morning, I wonder how I am even in Seattle because last November, as I was planning a drive West, I thought, I wonder if I could hit Seattle somehow. Less than a year later, I find myself living here. What?

In high school, I never imagined that there could possibly be a life beyond school, mostly just beyond high school, but for all-intensive purposes, let's generalize to school. I thought that the people around me who were older had always been that way. The history that we read about in books? Fiction. The same stories that my dad would tell over and over again at the dinner table... "When I was your age..."? Fables. At fifteen, I couldn't grasp the idea that the world existed in years before my memory, before my existence. I couldn't grasp the fact that the forty-year-old man that I passed at the gas station lived the past forty years. Forty years. Years that I will never know because I'm on track for my own set of numbered years.

Thinking about it all makes me wish that I could go backwards in time. I'm not sure that I would do anything different; I would just want to tell myself one thing: it keeps going.

As much as I claim to detest Facebook, it is good for some things. I have photo albums on there from 2009 to present, and while that's only three years, so much has happened. It's pretty amazing to look back and reflect on it all. I'm still in shock that these many adventures have occurred over such a short period of time. However, as I looked back, one photo really stuck out to me that if I were to go back in time, I would go to that moment. It was from my high school graduation party, and it's just a photo of Derek and me. But we were happy. We were healthy. We were so content with going wherever the future would lead us because there were so many possibilities.

There still are, but they're certainly not the same as then. I feel like I've been plopped right into the center of the Pacific. I'm swimming East because I know that's where I need to go. I can't tell what big waves may be brewing ahead; I can't tell how far until shore. I can't go back because it won't get me any closer, but I can look and try to gauge how far I've come. And just as each day that I do not write passes unrecorded, the waves behind me dissipate and blend with the rest of the water. If Derek were here, he would go into his Ellen Degeneres voice and say, "Just keep swimming, just keep swimming. What do we do? We swim! SWIM!" I just wish that he were still swimming with me.

With each second-hand tick, in that brief pause where the hand slips back before going forward again-- that's where I live.

June 11, 2009