I had a curious moment a few hours ago. I was running an errand near the ex-girlfriend’s house and I thought I’d stop by and say hello to her, her husband and her cats, and wish them all a happy pagan ritual and a good new year.

[See? I told you it was curious but ignore that crazy triangle for a moment and as it's too complicated to explain in a succinct way and too silly for me to try as it makes no sense at all for anyone to get invovled in a situation like that. Just focus on the ex-girlfriend part and maybe it will be more universal.]

Lately, I’ve been forcing myself to be the person I’ve always wanted to be (a little more open, a little more friendly, a little more…), so today I brought them soda and pastries. I petted cats and we chatted about inconsequential things. It was like it used to be when I first showed up in Tucson so many years ago.

What I found most peculiar though was the conscious experience of being perfectly familiar with those surroundings, having spent some portion of most every day there from 2001 to June of 2004. You spend a lot of time in a place, you get used to it, it starts to become a part of you without you really thinking about the place. It becomes fused with your spirit in a sense.

So I was at her house saying hi, catching up, talking about movies, and petting cats …

[small aside: Being covered in cat hair is a great way to meet women. I left there, went to Epic and was asked about the cat hair by two women in less than 5 minutes. I'm going to borrow people's cats and rub them on my clothes whenever I go out from now on!]

… and then I went to the bathroom that once used to hold my toothbrush and I was struck by an odd dichotomy of being intensely familiar with everything in the bathroom, the mirror, the exact placement of the various items, the soap, while at the same time, having an intense sense of it all being unfamiliar and new, of having everything be the other and not part of me at all.

This is the reality and this makes sense. It’s just a bit odd when you have the memory of the familiar suddenly being recognized as the unfamiliar.

This is related to the ways and patterns of my recent life. Throughout the past few weeks I’ve been recapitulating my life in Tucson. I’ve been meeting people I hadn’t seen or talked to for years. I’ve been going to places that I hadn’t thought of going to for years and experiencing them in new ways with my shifted perspective on my life that’s grown out of the past few months of neverending intropsection.

What does this mean? Nothing at all, a mere coincidence? Closure of a tear in my universal fabric? Or a simple observation of the inevitable consequence of a break in a long relationship?

Whatever it was it was curious that’s for sure. Like waking from a dream and not being quite sure of the reality and the whimsical, of being stuck in that fuzzy gray state between sleep and consciousness.