The Only Sense of Time I Have...

...is that it's passing.

Know what I mean?

"Eternity" is such a strange concept - it's endless, we can't escape it, we constantly live and have our being in it - but we can't ever get it back. Not all of it. Not really. Not ever.

Lately, I've been overwhelmed with a sense of nostalgia, and a very real, tangible discomfort with my own mortality, and the inability to return to the past - aside from memories and photographs. Every month and day and time period in my life has its own distinct emotional binding, its own music - its own life.

It seems like just yesterday I was happily nestled in my dorm room 200 miles away, snowed in and content with good company and good wine, watching a scary movie before finals week. Or at band camp, shivering as the sun sets beneath the black treeline and feeling that paradoxical adolescent yearning for both freedom and security.

...until I wake up and realize that I'm surrounded by hundreds of cardboard boxes in the cold cement stock room, dreading my next bank account statement and fretting over car payments and student loans. There's no more music. No more snow.

How much longer until I'm relishing the long-past sound of ripping cardboard in an empty, fluorescent stock room?

In the end, what we have are photographs and memories - treasure them. And treasure the "now."

Here are a few of my memories:

Goodbye 2007.