February 2006

When I'm wrapped up in whatever it may be, I sometimes catch myself scribbling down the date on the top-right side of my day's worth of class notes, or I'll notice it on TV or the bottom-right hand corner of my computer monitor. Today I noticed Feb. 28, 2006 and the thoughts came rushing into my head.

Yesterday evening I found myself stretched out on my bed attempting to do government readings. A blink of an eye later it was Feb. 28th, 2006. It was around 11:45 am and I was catching a quick brunch in the dining hall. Suddenly it was 3:00 pm and I was sitting at work in the physics department folding letters for a mass mailing, listening to music, thinking that in half an hour I'll start putting on stamps.

On Feb. 28th, 2006 I'm reminded of these moments, the way my life sometimes seems episodic, like a series of flashbacks. Each episode begins and ends and then with a blink I'm suddenly transported to another moment in time. I find myself trapped in the present only to be whisked away to another present time before I can savor the fleeting moment.

And on Feb. 28th, 2006 I'm reminded of the finality of it all. This is time, as we defined it, this is life, this is history, and this is how it so cunningly escapes us, never to return again. Feb. 28th, 2006: the end of a month in history, the end of a period that we've just lived and will never return. Never ever again. We mourn the loss of relatives, friends, sometimes pets and sometimes random things, and yet they leave us in just the same way as days and months do.

And with every day we bury, so do we relinquish someone we were. I might not ever be the same person as I was in the month of February, 2006. Did that part of me die? And how do we recover and remember who we were in those days that have passed away? Those days, now only memories, resting like shriveled decaying leaves in our minds.

Over the weekend I ran into a friend who met me freshman year in a writing seminar, those days when I was full of vitality and vigor. Those days when my blood would boil in anger and I would let it be known. I was determined to bring down the awful bureaucracies that reduced people to checkboxes and numbers. I handed in papers in which I insisted on spelling it "bureaucrazy." Fearless.

In that year I went to see my professor of Sociology 101 during her office hours not because I had a question about the homework, or wanted a regrade on my test. I sat in the chair across from her desk. She smiled. I told her I had been doing the readings, and they infuriated me. She listened, quiet, cautious. I recalled the reading about sexism in the military, the way women were treated, and the one in which white suburban students snubbed the poor at their schools, "they just don't work hard enough."

My voice almost cracked. "You see," I told the Professor almost shivering, "I guess I'm still one of those people who wants to change the world."

She blinked.

"That's," she paused, resigned. "That's great!" She managed almost superficially, perhaps just cynical, or realistic, hardened by the years. "We need people like you. Don't give up."

Then there's February, 2006. During the last weekend of the month never to return I bump into my friend from freshman year in the library. After the formalities and my (what seems to be habitual these days) proclamation of how tired and restless I am my friend says something. "You used to be so passionate," her eyes widen and a few specs of spit land somewhere on my cheek. I smile. "You would get so angry and you'd fight to change things. You wouldn't settle."

I sigh. Yes, I know exactly what she is going to say.

"But you know, you've changed so much. You're not like that anymore. You're just tired and ready to leave, depressed, just want to do enough to get by. That's how we all are, but you just used to be so passionate."

And February 2006 comes to an end. Time goes by and doesn't let us go back. Oh, how things change. But can we recover? Can we ever recover, or will our hopes and memories, the ambitions and ideals of the past, just get murky, decompose, and fade with the passage of time?