Whenever I see a photograph
of myself from childhood,
or whenever I hear my own voice
from decades past,
I am always reminded of how young I was,
I am always reminded of how untainted I was,
I am always reminded of how naive I was,
and I am always reminded of how much
I have changed, and also how much
I haven’t changed and will never change…
whenever I look back upon my own memories
I am always having to remind myself
that things might not have happened
exactly as I remember them happening -
because, no matter how good we think our memory is,
each of our memories and recollections
are always subject to our emotions -
and the farther away we are from
something that happened
the more that our perception of reality
becomes distorted and rewritten
with the version of our own internal narrative…
whenever I read something that I wrote
from years ago, when I was younger
and more inclined to believe everything
and take everybody on face value,
I look back on recent events
when my view on something or someone
was challenged and subsequently changed as a result -
and that is when I realise how important
is it to stay in the moment,
but not forget why things are
the way that they are
and why things were never meant to be
different than how they turned out…
whenever I read something I wrote,
whenever my own words and my own actions
return to me in some way,
I remember the fact that the past
is constantly talking to the present,
just as the present talks to
and perhaps even influences the past
in more ways than we realise,
and I find myself not regretting anything that I have done -
because we are all creating and recreating
our own version of our life
which only we have control over…
whenever I hear others talk about me
in the third person,
I always wonder how and why others
see me as they do and what it is about me
that has stayed with them
and reminds them of me -
but then of course there are the things
and there are the people whom I have known
who might not have as glowing of an opinion
of me as they used to;
however, I have learned that it doesn’t matter
what someone who is no longer in your life
thinks about you,
because it is those people
who take the time to reach out to you
and who want nothing but the best for you
who give you what you need, when you need it;
and when it all comes down to it,
everything and everyone all sound different,
and everything and everyone look different,
whenever they are heard as an echo
or whenever they are seen in reflection.