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01 January 2018

the last revolving year

because I have an overactive imagination, this blog feels like an untouchable record of days past. I've become separated enough from it that I sort of don't feel welcome back: the book has been sealed! touch not! and wonder, till it drives you mad, what would have followed if you had

but I bide the danger, return to my dusty place and find myself rather changed. it's been almost a year, guys (okay: seven months), and that's a long time. people have had babies in less.

-- no, I haven't had a baby. and no, I'm not having a baby. I'm just saying. the ol blogging routine doesn't fit quite as comfortably as it once did, kind of like those pants you can't wear now that you've given birth. 

still not pregnant! just using the overcomplicated-simile trick to make you wonder.

*edit: I accidentally deleted an entire paragraph here while writing this, so there's a whole thought transition missing -- that I don't remember and am not interested in trying to recreate. we'll just in medias res this popsicle stand.

morbid thoughts spring more easily to mind these days, with a hard deadline looming for the next big life milestone. it's a little surreal. it reminds me of graduating high school, actually, and the strangeness I felt as I realized that "this grade is the end of the line for some people;" that technically I could be done with school forever if I wanted to be. it was a big breaking point, a whole new Thing that I'd never encountered in the cyclical years of childhood.


that's the thing. growing up is very, very cyclical. school in the fall, break in december, school in the spring, road trippin in the summer, school in the fall, et cetera, seemingly ad infinitum. growing older doesn't mean much when you're five or eight or thirteen, it's just an ever-clarifying trip revisiting where you've been before. and then you're finishing high school and the years start to differentiate; and while "next year" at age 12 felt like a chance to redeem all the things you missed during this one at age 11, now that you're 18, 22, you're just hurtling forward through the universe and what's past is irretrievably, irredeemably past.


...is how it always seemed to me. I've had this weird sensation before of realizing this is my one shot: I have one life and it's now and I'll never be <here> again. the sensation is all the weirder when I realize that realization comes from feeling like I've either lived something before or that I'll have the chance to live it again. and I think that multiple-lives feeling stems from my very predictable years as a kid, when the seasons held the same things (with reasonable variation), and it felt like I'd be circling forever. until I wasn't.


any semblance of this circular motion ends for sure in april -- after which I won't even have the structure of school/summer in my life, which I find both terrifying and exhilarating. to continue with the circle game theme, and if life really is an amusement park with the merry-go-round for childhood, I guess I'm moving on to the big-kid rides. we're hitting up T2, montezuma's revenge, friggin ride of steel, and I am going up and growing up. and I plan to have 
a thrilling time experiencing everything.