Remember

Sometimes the hill appears and you take it and even though it’s obvious by a third of the way down that this can’t possibly be the way out, you descend to the bottom, just to prove to yourself that you were right all along about being all wrong.

The thing about having lots of experiences is that context gets lost; while you certainly recall each location from previous incarnations, where you were headed that time blends into multiple memories.  It’s not quite déjà vu if you’re seeing it for the first time once more but sufficient vestiges reveal themselves when re-encountered from a different direction.

I lost track of taillights leaving the park and let my bike take over the route; naturally, it chose distance over efficiency.

Somehow, though, we knew the bar’s porch would still be crawling with two-wheelers and so it was, complete with smiling faces inside to sing along with them. 

In his comprehensive history of the bicycle, Bicycle, David V. Herlihy writes that in 1874, Coventry Machinists improved the bicycle wheel, “introducing a durable construction with individually tensioned spokes interlaced for greater strength.”  Of course, that also describes how it feels around the fire, each of us wound a little tighter, connected via flames, the whole far stronger than any single component.

When you get to see the bright quarter moon resplendent between autumn branches, importuned by rising sparks and lifting voices, you need little more: some alcohol, sure, and ample cannabis to stay vertical and visual and maybe whatever else suits your fancy, but in the end (and for most of the beginning and middle, too) it’s all about simply being where you are at the time for the time you are there.

Eventually, if you hold the destination in your mind’s eye and trust there are roads to get there, you’ll find yourself arriving.  And when you do, you’ll know that you have by what you’ll remember when memories are made.