The beginnning was somewhat defined by an end, and it seems that the end now is most notable for a beginning. Funny how things come full circle when you least expect it. Months went by disguised as days, with enough curiosities to be thought of as years. And I still haven't grasped it all. Part of me wants to step outside myself, and replay it over again just to experience everything one more time. I want to have it all frozen in 3x5's and 4x6's. Little flimsy traps of time. But the other part of me thinks things are sometimes better in reflection. What the images and moments lose in clarity, they make up for in immediate emotional pull and beauty. Looking back gives a picture of the whole. And so everything can be drawn in with one deep breath of nostalgia.
One thing I can be happy about is that I never took it for granted. In every moment my thoughts of enchanted appreciation would rise up like a child who lives in black and white looking into a kaliedoscope with new eyes. And I told myself over and over that this moment would be one of the ones I would remember forever. I would squeeze my eyes shut as if that could preserve it in the fireproof archives of my mind. So I am left with still frames of a summer. Buying mangoes at a stand in a flea market downtown, sitting on the street against my car for hours of talking, laying under shooting stars on rocky ground, and just driving with good conversation as the music. It shall all remain with me for as long as I can muster. The future creeps up behind me as I am looking back, and manages to add a new dimension of excitement, But I view it with contempt, as if it is responsible for making the past a memory. I am so torn between looking back and looking forward that the in-between is blurry. The present is caught up in what isn't there. So I have tried to loosen my grip and focus on all there is momentarily. But I will always be Lot's wife, and life as a pillar of salt won't leave me soon I think.