A weekend trip up to Philadelphia provides welcome variance from the too-easy-to-sink-into reading that makes up most of my days, whirlwind visits with Philly friends and then a brief trip out to New Jersey, where I sang until I ran out of breath from exhaustion.
It was a weekend of odd dissonance and consonance, both musically and otherwise. (I use the word “weekend” in the loosest of senses, as a group of two or more adjacent days, since for me, now, one day is much like the next.) I went back to my alma mater to visit some professors, and despite knowing it would be the case was still disoriented by not knowing any of the faces I saw around me. I still think of myself as someone who just graduated from college, and the reminder that it’s been more than two years since that happened was a bit unnerving.
And then, waiting at a SEPTA station, it occurred to me that the last time I had been there was after saying goodbye to a dear friend before he moved west and I moved very, very east. A bittersweet memory, to say the least: I think we became closer while apart, but the friendship we have now is not what we had then.
It was a weekend full of reminders of the person who I was, the person I can’t tell if I still am. So many things are the same. But in confronting this evidence of my past life I realize that one thing has certainly changed: I have become a stranger in a very familiar land.
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