This picture is from way back summer 2009.

Time moves fast, doesn’t it?

I have fond memories of sorting through the immense number of rocks in my room to find some pretty ones to play mancala with with Erik Sin. I remember I used to wish I could find the ones Myles originally collected for me when he gave me this game for my birthday way back in the days I had parties on the beach with Mat. I can still remember unwrapping it from newspaper sitting at a old, weathered picnic table in the shade. My memories of the beach feel like daydreams sometimes. I can remember slipping out of clothes and into cold water, searching for tiny shells with Saja, playing house with the gang in patches of trees and gleefully running away with the squirt gun, hot sand, shortcuts down the path, sleeping under the stars when there were meteor showers, and making tattoos out of the milky sticky centre of a plant near the water and crushed charcoal. However, some memories are less certain. Mazes in the woods ending in campsites and old furniture, running off in to the woods and kissing, structures and designs made out of rocks and wood and distorted time lines.

Thinking back through moments reminds me how many there are, how much I’ve experience and changed. There are stories there.

It also makes me a little sad that I forget. That I lose touch with memories and many many people who have affected me over years and years and years. But I try to be happy, because time does not slow for sadness, and there is the present in all its glory to attend to.