Time doesn’t move the way the calendar says it does. Ask yourself where you were ten years ago and the honest answer is somewhere between “recently” and “unimaginably long ago” depending on which direction you approach it from. The events feel close — you can retrieve them, they have texture and color and specific sounds — but the person who lived them is far enough away that you’d have to reintroduce yourself. Not a stranger. More like a relative you were once very close to and now only see at holidays. You recognize each other. You’ve grown apart.
The strange thing is that the decade looks compressed from the outside. You list what happened — where you lived, who you were with, what you were working on, what fell apart, what got built — and it sounds like a lot. It was a lot. But living through it didn’t feel like a lot. It felt like weeks, mostly. Like an ordinary accumulation of Tuesdays that only retrospectively reveals itself as a decade. The weight of it only becomes visible when you step back far enough to see the whole shape, and you rarely step back that far until something forces you to.
What I find hardest is locating the changes. You know you’ve changed — the evidence is everywhere, in what you want and what you can tolerate and what you find funny and what you can’t do anymore and what you finally can. But you can’t find the moments where the changes happened because they weren’t moments. They were gradual and distributed across hundreds of ordinary days that didn’t announce themselves as anything. You just kept living and the person doing the living kept shifting and one day you looked down and your hands looked like your father’s hands and you didn’t know when that happened.
The people who were there for all of it are the real archive. Not photographs, not journals — the people who knew you ten years ago and still know you now, who have the before and the after in their memory simultaneously, who can say “you used to” with authority and be right. They hold the continuity you can’t fully hold yourself. They’re the proof that it was the same person the whole time even when it doesn’t feel like it.
Ten years from now I’ll look back at right now and feel the same double thing — recent and ancient, close and foreign. The person I am today will be the one I’m trying to remember. I won’t get everything right. I’ll be surprised by some of it. I’ll probably think: I had no idea what was coming, which will be true, it’s always true, and knowing that now doesn’t help as much as you’d think. You just keep going forward into the decade and find out what it was when it’s over. That’s the whole deal. It’s a pretty good deal, actually. Most days.