My Life is an Onion

Have you ever had the longing to revisit the past, to search through the virtual memories of your hard drive—both intangible and real? I started taking digital pictures back in 2003, a couple of years before I created this blog. It’s a strange experience to look back, to put on some ambient music and gaze at the you of years gone by. I look different. There is a rounder tilt to my face, less wrinkles, less sun spots, and a slight shift of fear behind my eyes. I see a boy, not quite yet a man, trying to make his way in the world, fully invested in his life, though not entirely sure what that life should be. I see friends, work, school, my relationship, it's so strange. Like looking at someone who is both me and not me, a memory faded.

Thought: Our lives they move so quickly. We rise up out of the soil, stretch out towards the sun. Our faces change, small and hairless, that find girth, strength, and weight, only to sink back down, the certainty of change our only stability as we rise and fall and fall again.

Thought: It’s odd to think that we are the first generation of humans with the technology to capture the past. One swift blink, snap, and that moment is frozen in time. My life is now a series of folders, layers of some great cosmic onion that can be peeled off year by year. Imagine, should the human race continue to blunder on, your future sons and daughters – generations hence – might stumble on those folders, catch a glimpse of you, their great great grand something sipping on some tea.

Thought: And this journal, cooler still! Maybe I can write for the rest of my life. Maybe the future will know me through the very words that I’m typing now. Alas, perhaps I should feel remiss for not introducing myself sooner. Hello future me, my sons and daughters. Enjoy these words and these pictures. They were my life.

If I can send one message from the past, above and beyond anything I have written before, it is to cherish your life. It is yours, your chance to shine beneath the sun, your cosmic onion.

(If this post makes no sense I do apologize. I was having a moment)