Digital Nostalgia

oh hai.

It's hard to escape the past in the Facebook Age, someone, somewhere, with idle time and a slip of a memory will search for you, and you will check your email at work, and your brain will communicate momentary confusion and you will utter Jesus Christ outloud, and your cubemate (at least mine), will say, Yes?

And it will be your roommate when you lived in Aix-en-Provence, and she will say, do you realize it's been twenty years. And you click out of your email quickly, to stave off all of those slips of memory, ticker tape randomness of all that was, the toilet next to the kitchen sink, a market full of flowers, my mouth full of another language, N peeing in her boots in Marseille, me trying on full tantrum and chucking a drink at the curr I had misguidedly and half-assedly fallen for.

Then, tonight, two bites into curry I remember. I was pregnant with my high school sweetheart's child. And we mutually agreed, with our parents consent (what were they thinking) that I would make my way to France and figure it the fuck out. Which I did, with remorse, but without regret. So twenty years and what if. Just a fleeting thought, and then it's back to the curry and reading about the Vatican library in the New Yorker.

I leave on Saturday morning for Mexico with eight of my oldest friends, we are going to celebrate our collective fortieth birthday. It seems so abstract to me. Obviously, turning 40 is better than the alternative, but wasn't 1991, like, yesterday?