The dust is settling on our faces

“It’s as if no time has passed” is the phrase we use to describe the closeness we feel upon reuniting with loved ones.  We pick up the threads of conversation as if we have just left the room a few minutes ago instead of the months or sometimes years that have ensued in between.

Basil and I moved to San Francisco in late 2002 and returned to the East Coast up to three times a year to visit our friends and his family. But, the first fissures appeared six years later in 2008 when, instead of the home I remembered, Boston became strange enough that I needed to carry a map to remember routes I had once known by heart.

In March we visited again and this time Boston had morphed from merely unfamiliar into a graveyard filled with the bodies of past lovers, old dreams, and the person I might have been had I chosen to stay. I stood at the Harvard Square crosswalk chilled by something that had nothing to do with the weather.

“When you’re here, do you ever feel like you might bump into your alternate self – the one who stayed?” I whispered to Basil.

Other uses for a cow

My father reminiscences about diving into the Lahore Canal as a child with his brothers as a way to cool off during summer’s intense heat. This photo reminded me of that.

Cows are used for diving platforms in Hyderabad, Pakistan.