A Year of Light

In moments of great stress, every life form that exists gives out a tiny subliminal signal. This signal simply communicates an exact and almost pathetic sense of how far that being is from the place of his birth. On Earth it is never possible to be further than sixteen thousand miles from your birthplace, which really isn't very far, so such signals are too minute to be noticed. Ford Prefect was at this moment under great stress, and he was born 600 light years away in the near vicinity of Betelgeuse

That quote is one of about 10,000 quotes from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I must have read the series of Hitchhiker books all together around 50 times or so, and every time I reach this passage it strikes me as something that would be true. That is to say, if space travel were something that was happening, this phenomenon would be all over the place. Douglas Adams, I concluded, must have been from space.

Now that I’m older I begin to understand that passage in a far different context.

Individual memories have always shifted in and out of my head – presently floats along bee stings while picking raspberries at our old house, and now meeting the teenage mutant ninja turtles when I was five. Each present-time stimulus dances around my sub-conscious, whirling rapidly until it finds a memory to connect to; that rock reminds me of my stitches in 7th grade, that lamp post of a house party in high school.

Now I find entire eras, entire genres of people, floating in and out. I’ve been a part of so many communities that it seems I can’t keep them all in my head simultaneously. NFTY, three summer camps, Public School, College, Salt Lake, Israel. Further sub divisions – oh these are my Boy Scout public school friends, these are my hiking Salt Lake friends.

I am not yet a quarter of a century old and some eras of my life seem poised precariously on the outskirts of my memory. I have a strict policy of only accepting facebook friend request from those I know personally, and yet my friend number sits at over 1500, a number that is at once both reassuring and daunting.

And that’s the crux of it, I suppose. Today is the anniversary of the death of a person who at one point existed within a community that solely owned my heart. At no point did that community relinquish its grasp of my heart, but slowly others grew within it, and that community, though still a part of who I am, no longer has full possession. That realization leaves me feeling…guilty. Almost as if it is a betrayal of my friend that what bound us at one point plays a lesser role now, less than ten years after the fact. If I intend to live a long and satisfactory life (and I do) then what do the states of my past relationships say about the future of my present ones?

There are some days where I feel like I am 600 light years away from my home.

May her memory be for a blessing, this year and every year.