Recursive Words

I’m sitting in the dark of the junk room watching the remains of the weekend ebb away from me. Sunday became Monday a minute or two ago. Kacey Musgraves is quietly filling the room with songs about anything and everything while I busy myself with avoiding the arrival of tomorrow.

An old friend reached out across the internet late last night. The few words we exchanged provided the catalyst for yet another damn fool Internet escapade. Another crusade I don’t really have time for.

It’s almost like I can’t resist slippery slopes.

You may recall I wrote earlier in the year about searching for a lost tribe. I’m considering mounting an expedition in search of them. Making time to return to the fold at WordPress and Tumblr. I have no idea what or who I might re-discover, but that will be part of the fun.

Not so much the undiscovered country, as the re-discovered country.

I often hear people talk about “losing touch” as if their connections are forever broken. I prefer to think of them as misplaced. The thing about things you mis-place is they are still there.

While trying to make sense of it all in the past, I’ve drawn a parallel with leaves on a river – quite unexpectedly crossing paths, travelling together for a time before being pulled apart by the turbulent currents that life throws at us. While you might lose sight of them in the chaos, you never forget. We change each other.

I’ve always thought the internet has a funny way of bending time and space – bringing you back to the same bends of the same rivers over and over again.

In the “re-discovered country,” nobody is ever truly gone. They are just waiting for the right catalyst—a late-night message, a shared song, a sudden urge to log back into a forgotten dashboard.

Perhaps we leave bits of ourselves behind – paragraphs, photos, fragments of thought. Perhaps they are like breadcrumbs that eventually lead us back to one another.

I suppose it’s a realisation of sorts – that the most wonderful people have been  woven into the fabric of my story. No matter how far the river carries me, we’ll cross paths again eventually.

It’s almost like the cogs of the great machine were designed for a greater purpose. In the end, its waters always find a way to bring us back to the same shores.