Do you ever have one of those days where you just feel like everything is a bit surreal? I’m there for some reason.  Not in a bad way.  I think it’s because we got word that an old college chum (that’s a Nancy Drew word, always liked using it) passed away last week.  I wasn’t particularly close to Tom, but he was part of the crowd that hung around and played and listened to music in The Mug Rack, which was in the student union building at Marquette.  (Yes.  We had a beer bar in our student union.  Many a Friday afternoon three o’clock Spanish class was missed because I took a short cut through the union.  Ah, Milwaukee.)  At any rate, I have not seen him since college, so he is frozen in my mind as he was, as we all were.  Young.  Our lives waiting for us to leave that wonderful place and enter the real adult world.

I can’t seem to stop my head from going back there.  I can’t seem to wrap my head around the amount of years that have passed.  I can’t grasp how much we have all changed, and why it has to be this way.  I guess it’s that favorite philosopher part of me rearing its confused head, wanting to understand what it all means, Mr. Natural.   I ache for the ability to travel back in time, to say things that needed to be said that weren’t, to listen to that music and not care about tomorrow.

I went to the ocean to walk today, as if that could make anything clearer; of course it just reinforces how unknowable it all is.  Tomorrow will be better, but tonight I just don’t understand, and I so desperately want to.