(come back to me a while change your style again)

so much changes in 20 days and 15000 miles.

I used to try to reconstruct things. The first woman I ever loved – well, she was a girl and I was a boy then, and the word “loved” is not to be trusted – we once went on a walk by midnight out on the high desert to look at the stars. If she was in love with me at the time I have never been able to determine, but undoubtedly the time was then to hold her hand or to say whatever it is innocent boys say to their first love. But I did not, and I spent more time in the following months than I will admit trying to understand what happened. With time, of course, I ceased to care all that much, but by then, out of the pain of reiterated failure, I had learned that some things are simply not accessible to examination from the future.

From here they shift like so many ghosts, and to touch the past with even the lightest of questions is an impossible violation of it, so that the answers you get are only simple variations on the question, a bounded wave…

(you can’t change time, thank you Einstein)

Now I let the past sit on my shoulder and whisper to me in its own voices:

20December2001 29December2001

Happy New Year, nine hours in advance: you know who you are.