This life can be strangely cyclical sometimes. My feeding tube was getting old and in need of replacement, and so a visit to the hospital was needed. I hadn’t been back to this hospital in over a year; since my first tube was placed. I’ll be honest, returning to the place that I spent so much of my adolescence after so much time away felt incredibly strange. I came back to the same building, and, coincidentally, the same bed and stretcher bay as when my tube was originally placed, an entirely different person. Coming back to an old way of life as effectively a new and changed human, I have learned, triggers the strongest deja vu sensation that I have ever had. The closest thing I could probably liken it to would be revisiting a childhood home that your family moved out of long ago, or your former elementary school; you become a stranger in a place that was once familiar.
In a way, in the past year, life has come full circle and yet also moved full steam ahead. I suppose that describes life as a whole though: remnants of the past interspersed with reminders that change is inevitable and time only moves forward. People change, but places, and memories associated with them, stay more or less the same. Maybe, just like in other parts of our lives, we have to learn how to balance. We all try to toe a delicate line between retaining memories of the past while still living in the present and planning for the future, and it’s far too easy to let one element dominate; pulling us away from the experience at hand. Perhaps the key is simply experiencing every moment as it happens and allowing it to pass by naturally, even when those moments pull us away from the “real world”. Perhaps the most touching moments occur when we do not force them at all.
Sabina Catherine 