time loop

I had one of those indescrible moments today, where the curtain slides aside and you feel like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t.

I’m chalking it up to a conflux of influences, not the least of which is that I’m still a little high, the result of consuming an edible at 5 am (pain). Emotionally speaking, I am adrift – big things have transpired over the past few days, things that I don’t yet have words for. And well, okay, I’ve been reading a book about time-traveling back to the eve of Y2K, so my early 20s have been on the brain.

Completed a few errands around town, ending with a run to the bank. For whatever reason, even through moves out of state and out of country, I’ve kept an account open at a rinky-dink credit union on the far side of town, directly next to where C works, where C has worked since we were 19, and it’s impossible not to think about him in that place; in this mood. Time has long diminished any hold he once had on me, but not the sadness. Never that. It’s been too long, carrying this around, but I can’t seem to shake it, no matter how hard I try.

Transaction completed, I leave, and all I can see is the change. How this town, like so many of the other DFW suburbs, is swollen compared to its former self. Strip malls and restaurants and endless new housing additions. All at once, it’s so easy to see how things were, and the contrast is startling.

It’s hard sometimes, not to think about everything I would change if I could. Or not, because what would that fix? (Plus, you know, all the implications of time travel, blah blah blah.)

And at then Pack’s “Time Loop” comes up on shuffle, and Madeline Link is singing:

Found a time loop
Hope you come back soon
I’m anxious and salivating
Prove that I’m alive
See? Oh, pinch me
…
It’s not hopeless, yet
It’s not hopeless, yet
…
She said while driving away
What is that strange sensation

I couldn’t have picked a better song for the moment if I tried, now crying and parked in my driveway. Maybe some small part of me mourning the end of whatever had just transpired, but mostly because I feel the events of the past few days pushing me in a direction that is scary and possibly harder than anything I’ve ever faced. Because maybe it’s easier to think about what I could have changed 25 years ago vs. the changes that need to be made in the here and now.

All of this feels silly, a little emotionally overwrought. Posting it just the same, at least for now.