on melody and memory.

This morning, Pandora decided to play me a song that I hadn't heard in quite a while, a song that was part of a CD that I happened to purchase during a whiny and particularly crap period of my life. At the time I felt like hell, and while I wouldn't consider this album to be "emo" by any standards, I found it inspiring. I mean, whatever. We all have our moments, right?

The odd thing about this experience, though, was that the song made me smile. Not because I'm a different person now, or because I'm happier today than I was back then, or because it was one of my favorite songs at the time, regardless of ambient circumstance. No, this particular song made me smile precisely because it put me right back in that place. It was a romantic walk back through a bitterness that I can only now fully appreciate. Don't get me wrong - my smile had absolutely nothing to do with what I learned from my mistakes, or the clarity with which I can now reflect on the situation. It was simple, sweet nostalgia for my own overwhelming (and probably overblown) angst.

This has happened to me more times than I can count; a piece of music rolls through me, leaving swells of adversity in its wake, inevitably culminating in a kind of tragic happiness. And it got me thinking about the power of memory. I can only assume that my own troublesome feelings about the past lose their potency as a kind of self-preservation. So that the narrative remains fact, but the feelings become more like fiction, vague flashes of moments that I can rewrite and fill in on a whim.

Does this happen to anyone else? Maybe not. Is any of this rational? Maybe not. Maybe I'm a control freak who desperately needs to be in charge of her own history. Or maybe I'm just obsessed with the fullness of feeling. Either way, it's a response I wouldn't give up for the world.

Three months.

What a fantastic couple of weeks. To start with, Sheida arrived two weeks ago. Some highlights from the five days that followed: spending hours upon hours perusing books downtown, running at the reservoir, belly dancing, racing tricycles around one of Boulder's best dive bars, hiking in the mountains around Mitchell Lake up in Ward, building an evening campfire in Nederland, staring up at millions of stars and having deep conversations about our futures, seeing Hubble at the IMAX in Denver, surprise salsa dancing, filming yet another original movie (which can be viewed here, for the curious), tooling around Pearl Street, and of course, eating lots and lots of delicious food.

After she left, I had about a day and a half to breathe. Then my dad arrived. Drove up to Ward again, this time to hike the Isabelle Glacier trail around Long Lake. Incredible. He was nice enough to have my ailing car repaired, so we spent one day exploring Pearl Street and the rest of downtown on foot, poking in and out of shops, bookstores, the beautiful library, and of course, restaurants. We visited the Museum of Science in Denver, saw Hubble (yes, again) and a planetarium show, and drove up to Nederland to watch the spectacularly clear Perseid meteor shower. Another day, we went hiking at Chatauqua Park and stumbled upon one of the most incredible natural phenomena I've ever seen: the Royal Arch. It's an enormous stone archway that frames an amazing panorama of Boulder, the Flatirons, and the rest of the Front Range. The trail made for a fairly taxing hike, but in the end, it was so worth it. Spending so much time with my dad was certainly something new, but it was really great to reconnect. I know he wasn't thrilled about returning to Rhode Island. Both he and Sheida seemed to really love it here. But... let's be honest, it's hard not to.


(here's why.)

Now I have a couple of weeks to regroup and relax before my next series of visitors arrive. I really love having people come out here, but it will be nice to have some time to process everything that has been going on. Apparently life doesn't stop while you're busy entertaining other people... who knew? I'm currently in the midst of starting my applications for grad school. Now, don't get me wrong. I'm incredibly excited, but I'm also a bit overwhelmed too. Not that it's a bad "overwhelmed". In fact, it's the same kind of "overwhelmed" I felt last spring when everything suddenly aligned to push me out here. I'm not terribly high on the idea of having to move back east, but I finally feel like I'm on the right path. Honestly, that's worth all the flat topography in the world. What's funny is that professional contacts have kind of just been falling into my lap lately. It will never stop amusing me, how things just seem to work out sometimes.