Last night Andi and I moved back into the Oakwood. So little has changed: our room (this time a few floors up) looks and feels the same, the view of Mallya's under-construction skyscraper is the same (although it has grown from two floors to ten), the hostess remembered our love of cappuccinos this morning at breakfast, the dosas were as good as we remembered; the only thing that changed is that Bill has taken Mr. Cliff's seat at breakfast. All of which was incredibly surreal: did the last two years really happen?
And so we are back to thinking about time. It feels like we were here just last weekend and all that has happened in the last two years happened in some other time, in some other place. This has been for us, a bracketed experience - we always had expiration dates stamped on our foreheads, even as, at the end, that expiration date kept shifting - and so has been one long duration, in a way outside the passage of time, of normal time, of the moving time of everyday lives, which is to also say an absolute presence, or present-ness, a continual growing with experiences and friends and loves, and unfortunately a love of food that has become too literal growth that we could never get a distance from to know, only ever experiencing this wild and amazing privilege. Even our moments of normalcy have been passing and fleeting, ephemeral and impossible to grasp. It has been a two years of unbelievable and at this time still yet unknowable living. It will be long after we are back in the US, long after we have returned to our "regular and normal" lives that all of this can begin to make sense. That it will be a part of our histories that we can know and narrate.
This is at least part of why we imagine it will be so hard to return: as we have been living in this long durational present, everyone else has gone on living. Our friends and families have grown and lived and loved and lost, we no longer know by feel how to get around our Cities, our favorite restaurants won't taste the same, our favorite parks won't feel the same, and we will recognize all this change before we recognize how much we have changed. But we have. And we will continue to. Even when we don't know it.
And so we are back to thinking about time. It feels like we were here just last weekend and all that has happened in the last two years happened in some other time, in some other place. This has been for us, a bracketed experience - we always had expiration dates stamped on our foreheads, even as, at the end, that expiration date kept shifting - and so has been one long duration, in a way outside the passage of time, of normal time, of the moving time of everyday lives, which is to also say an absolute presence, or present-ness, a continual growing with experiences and friends and loves, and unfortunately a love of food that has become too literal growth that we could never get a distance from to know, only ever experiencing this wild and amazing privilege. Even our moments of normalcy have been passing and fleeting, ephemeral and impossible to grasp. It has been a two years of unbelievable and at this time still yet unknowable living. It will be long after we are back in the US, long after we have returned to our "regular and normal" lives that all of this can begin to make sense. That it will be a part of our histories that we can know and narrate.
This is at least part of why we imagine it will be so hard to return: as we have been living in this long durational present, everyone else has gone on living. Our friends and families have grown and lived and loved and lost, we no longer know by feel how to get around our Cities, our favorite restaurants won't taste the same, our favorite parks won't feel the same, and we will recognize all this change before we recognize how much we have changed. But we have. And we will continue to. Even when we don't know it.
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