Time, music, and memory

I thought I had posted my last update on my trip back to California, but my mind doesn’t stay within the neat boundaries of defined time. I’m back home now, after a month in California and Paris, sitting at my kitchen table, when suddenly this song picks me up and brings me back.

Sometimes memories are more alive inside you than the updated reality. Back from California, here I am in Amsterdam once again, empty hands, with a song that takes me back not to the Co-op Thanksgiving I just visited, but the other Co-op Thanksgiving, a long year ago. So much sweeter, and so much closer now.

“I’m curious to see how you’ll handle it all, because everything will be much different when you return,” my dad had said on the airport on the morning of my departure. Those words rung true, though I didn’t know yet in what way. They kept following me the entire journey, and trailed back home to the Netherlands with me to this moment alone at my kitchen table, where they finally ripen into their full meaning.

A life is so much more than the people or the places that feature in it. It is the place you have in the mesh, the role you fulfill in the perfectly balanced web. I still have a place in the people’s hearts, and I can take up space in old familiar places, but with my role gone, I can’t return to that life.

How strange the way time wraps itself in whichever way it pleases around your existence. I went back to California out of love for those sweet memories, and now once back it’s still those same memories I travel back to, rather than new ones.

How all-knowing is music, showing you your own true heart like that. Those people then, that land then, me in that moment. That’s where the waves of song take me now. And also to the lonely months that followed, stranger in a new city back home, where it was just me and this music to tide me over, onto a new life. The music-and-memory duo seem to have their own agenda, picking out moments you thought were of no consequence at all.

Periods in my life keep rearranging themselves to each other. My trip back to California bleeds over into the year I spent there, erasing the intermediate 11 months in the Netherlands from my mind. Before being separated again starkly by the music that takes me back to my year there, but blots out my recent trip. And the most recent time, spent outside Paris in deep ceremony with indigenous elders from all corners of the world during the climate summit, is a whole story on its own. Time, again, behaved so very differently there. Like a smaller but much denser planet than either my California trip or the preceding 11 Dutch months, it bends the space-time fabric into almost impossible folds. And then periods from years ago poke up their heads from my subconscious, heralded by old characters that featured in them and suddenly reappear in my life.

Like a vast sea, with each wave crest a different period, they keep dancing that peculiar dance with each other, impossible for me to keep track of. Time has shown me so many faces recently that I don’t know what to make of it any more.  

Time, music, memory… such mesmerizing enigmas of existence. I wonder at you, but I’m wise enough not to try to figure out your devious depths. I’ll go along with it all, appreciating your occult nature, giving my life such delicious saturation. I’m curious to see where next you’ll take me.