Sometimes I have moments when I think of younger me, and I don’t feel as though I know her anymore.  I don’t understand her choices, I think she must have been a completely different person than I am today.  She feels unrecognizable.

And then, by luck or circumstance, I find something I wrote years ago.  And in those words, in those sentences and paragraphs I hear myself and remember that even if years have passed and I have changed, it hasn’t been so much as to render my younger self obsolete.

Today, in my pursuit of a more organized office, I happened upon something random — not in a journal and not properly dated.  But as I read it I knew exactly when I’d written it and I felt it as though it were yesterday.  I saw my more naive self, I read her feelings and my heart beat for her.  I thought of a time when the amount of tragedy that I had endured was much less than it is today.  When smaller things felt more seismic.  When I didn’t fully understand loss.

Time is such a trickster.  I feel young and simultaneously, old.  I remember days when I felt like I ruled the world — in such contrast with the feeling of knowing nothing – the feeling of being constantly out of my depth.  I lost my mother yesterday and years ago … memories faded with time.  Pain faded with time.  Pain so acute that I feel it in my heartbeat, pulsing in my ears.

In ten years time will I recognize this version of me?  Will I re-read my words and marvel at my innocence; will my heart break for the naive joy that still exists within me? I don’t know.

But I hope so.

Xox, g