Over the last few weeks, I’ve thought a lot about my life since April. Ignoring the emotional complexities of late, I’ve found my memory of this time to be sort of fascinating in that at times over the past few days, I’ve had these nostalgic feelings — but not nostalgic like a birthday or graduation. This nostalgia has a dream-like/alternate universe tinge to it that has me dangerously close to questioning its actual reality. Inception jokes aside, I say this as an attempt to express how cinematic it all feels in hindsight, while knowing I was in fact there breathing/seeing/thinking/etc. Let me explain.
A month ago, I was living a life that I felt stable and satisfied with. My stresses were minimal, and I was doing what I wanted to be doing with myself. When life changed suddenly, a few things happened. First, and most obvious, was that volatility that shakes all your pieces around like dice in one of those yahtzee cups. Next, which was less obvious at the time, but apparent to me now, is how one day my life was focused on a particular set of things, and the next I found those things completely boggled around (excuse all the board game metaphors.. I like board games). Everything changed as quickly is it did back in the spring — this has an unfortunate poetry to it. The sudden change though, is why I feel the early summer was some parallel existence.
Almost like in Back to the Future, when Marty goes back and decides to push George McFly out of the way of Lorraine’s father’s car, which ends up hitting Marty instead of George. If Marty doesn’t play superhero, he wouldn’t have ended up in his mother’s bed sans pants — and so things begin to spin off accordingly. Back in March, I wasn’t quite feeling up to staying out after an already long and exciting night in the city, but we continued on, and I found myself dancing with Daphne — so like Marty’s heroic act, this event marked the beginning of a digression from my status quo… and without it, life would have presumably continued on, business as usual.
On the flip side, Marty’s existence is instantly restored (mostly) to life as he knew it, pre-car accident, when George finally plants one on Lorraine Baines at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance. The details of my departure from an alternate reality are a little rougher around the edges, but the idea is still the same. Referencing Back to the Future is somewhat inverted since Marty got himself into a situation he was trying to escape from, where I would have gladly hung out in my 1955 a bit longer.
I guess I’ve found that although a person can have vivid, conscious experiences, cataclysmic changes that bookend this period of time can make it feel a bit surreal. I don’t think there’s anything one might do about controlling how these events play out. If you could, change wouldn’t be so sudden, but instead expected and likely more gradual. And though change has come for me in the form of great packages as well as dismal ones, ultimately it’s always led me to an improved state of being — perhaps there could have been better paths, but I don’t feel I’ve ever pulled “Go Back to Baltic Avenue” from the Community Chest. Full steam ahead.
Tags: bttf, change, life, nostalgia
