Tonight marks the end of January.
I've been in France for 16 days - that's 2 weeks and 2 days - and the memory of boarding United Airlines flight 4944 is still in my mind, as fresh and as potent as ever. And yet, even in remembering this, I don't feel like I'm the same person who stepped aboard that plane.
Well, that's not entirely true.
The face in the mirror is still my own, only now less 5 pounds. And the pain that I feel when I think of the people I've left behind is just as raw as when I left. But I feel different. Older, more aware.
A line keeps repeating inside my head from a short story collection I picked up seven years ago at Barnes & Noble in their bargain bin:
"We are what people make us, that's a fact I've learned is as true as the stars...We are still ourselves, just not who we intended to be."
And then I wonder. Who was it that I intended to be?
Three years ago the answer was easy: wealthy, famous, attractive. Now all that seems hollow to me.
But still the question remains.
And I have no answer for it. I don't want an answer, I don't want an intention.
Not yet, anyway.
I've been in France for 16 days - that's 2 weeks and 2 days - and the memory of boarding United Airlines flight 4944 is still in my mind, as fresh and as potent as ever. And yet, even in remembering this, I don't feel like I'm the same person who stepped aboard that plane.
Well, that's not entirely true.
The face in the mirror is still my own, only now less 5 pounds. And the pain that I feel when I think of the people I've left behind is just as raw as when I left. But I feel different. Older, more aware.
A line keeps repeating inside my head from a short story collection I picked up seven years ago at Barnes & Noble in their bargain bin:
"We are what people make us, that's a fact I've learned is as true as the stars...We are still ourselves, just not who we intended to be."
And then I wonder. Who was it that I intended to be?
Three years ago the answer was easy: wealthy, famous, attractive. Now all that seems hollow to me.
But still the question remains.
And I have no answer for it. I don't want an answer, I don't want an intention.
Not yet, anyway.
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