Reclamation

I will reclaim the hidden corners of this city
That remind me most of you.

I will venture to these quiet places
To find new moments and new meanings
With new people
So that the memory of you in these retreats
Will not shatter me.

I will return to these places,
The ones that remind me most of you,
And though the echoes of happier times
Cannot, will not be silenced,
I will take these places back
And make them my own.

For all that you have broken,
For all that you have done,
You will not wrest this city from me.

You will not taint my home
With memories bitter and painful.

I will reclaim these places for myself,
These places that remind me most of you,
Until a day dawns when I return
To these once-hallowed walks,
And your presence is
But a single shadow among many,
The memory of you one in a multitude.

Air Travel aka The Poor Man’s TARDIS

I’ve been traveling quite a bit this week, and my journeying isn’t even over yet.  As of about 9pm tomorrow I will have been on three planes in six days.  Flash forward to a few weeks from now and that number will have jumped up to a total of six plane rides in a month.  As someone who (much to my chagrin) has neither the time nor the resources to do as much traveling as I would like, that is a lot of time spent up in the air, soaring amongst the clouds.

It is perhaps because of that reason that I have recently been marveling at the sheer miracle that is air travel.  Or marveling at it more so than I normally do.  Because think about it: you get on board a huge hunk of metal that really has no business at all in even dreaming of flight, and then what does it do?  In a mere matter of hours it spirits you away to a completely different spot on the globe.  A journey that not so many generations ago would have taken days, weeks, or months to complete (depending on how far you’re going) can now be made in a matter of hours.

It’s easy to forget such an astounding fact when the whole process has become so commonplace – even mundane if you do it regularly enough.

And that’s not even the most extraordinary part of it all.  There’s also the whole low-key time-traveling bit.  While all of my travels this month are confined to the west coast of the US and I therefore don’t have to change time zones, I always think back to my flights to and from London when I studied abroad there for a semester (and which are the current record-holder for longest flights I’ve ever been on).  Flying to the UK from California sent me forward in time.  And the return flight to California sent me back in time – to the point where after I had spent 11 hours up in the air, I’d only lost about 3 hours on the ground.

I don’t know about you folks, but that’s amazing to me.  It’s certainly the closest I’ll ever get to being a Time Lord, so I’ll take it.

Now if only airplanes could be bigger on the inside, too…

Reading Wrap-up: April 2017 Edition

Another month gone by, and another couple of books knocked off of my to-be-read list!

April was a lighter reading month (I only finished two novels), partly because I was busy with other things and partly due to reasons that shall be enumerated below.  But let’s just dive into it, shall we?