Not even the past remains static.

I’ve been reading through my pieces from the past year. Specifically what I wrote down at the beginning and middle of my first year on the island.

I’m struck by the intense reflection— I grappled with a form of grief I’d never encountered before.

It wasn’t easy to give myself the grace I needed to heal from that.

I’d spent months trying to dispel myself of the notion that I could be lonely. Or that the state of flux I was in didn’t relate to my undecided plans for staying in Japan.

The turning point has been committing to a Portland return. I’ve gone on countless social excursions since then— throwing myself into parties, athletic events, and anything else that life offered up. Sucking the marrow from the bone.

Things are both embarrassingly simple and horribly complicated. We aren’t well equipped to judge the things that make us happy. Often, we fall into the trap of believing something will make us happy. Make us feel validated. Whatever hole you’re trying to plug— whatever emotion that will fit.

But we can dismiss ready answers. Things that dance in front of us on the daily. The things that newcomers to our lives can spot within five minutes and go, “why not this?” and point to the thing you won’t stop chattering about before you dismiss it with a wave, going “oh, it can’t be that. That’s been there forever.” But whatever “that” thing is— it most times, is the thing that flips our proverbial script.

This ramble is less about that— and more about enjoying this spot I’m in now. Five months left to enjoy something I’ve already been in for over a year. There’s a wild abandon to the finite nature of it. A permission to be goofy and energetic. To try weird ass shit and swing for the fences.

There’s a subtle undertone of “you’ll never be back this way again,” to all the things I see and people I meet (not all, but most). It rubber-stamps the joy. The confusion. The splendiferous fuckery of it all.

The other night I stood under a wash of stars and held my hands out to the first warm breeze of the emerging spring. I shook my head and laughed as the tell-tale flash of warmth ran down my spine. In that moment I couldn’t have been anywhere else in the world. I couldn’t have been anything but who I was.

I gazed upon distant constellations in their slanted axis and said thanks. Somewhere back in time, through distant light, a younger version of me stood wondering what it would be to become older.

I still have the same question— but the fever is gone. Instead I say thanks— and smile yet at what is to come.