i think about our diaspora sometimes, the memories we shared in our younger years in a hometown we can all call our own even though we've separated. some are farther away than others but thanks to technological advantage our generation doesn't necessarily suffer that affliction of lost contact that, throughout much of the type of society that is stable enough to care about such things, caused the "best years of our lives" to be pockmarked by a longing and despair for those who have left us behind and vice versa. it was the complete unknowing, then. now, if nothing else, we have a solid idea of where everyone ended up, and we all migrate back for holidays and maybe run into each other in the familiar places. we trade empty promises on birthdays or whenevers, the sort we've all apparently agreed shouldn't really burn our hearts in their insincerity; we all do it.

from a distance, we'll watch familiar faces change ever so slightly with the advance of the years and think back on certain moments (and we'll remember fewer each year until we begin to mix them and run them together, creating a composite image of youth that's made up of people, but not specific people) and wonder which moments are creating new memories in the lives of those who were once the world to us. we recognise that they are now the world of others, just as we are, and we'll become vaguely aware of the names of their friends and significant others through stories passed along on the rare moments direct contact is made. but it's a whole new life and there's no time to explain it all, so the image is that of a complete person up until about age eighteen. anything you know after that is fragmented and it will never be complete again. maybe we'll even meet some of these people our old friends have found new friendship in, but we'll quickly forget the connection of face to name after they are introduced to us as our heartbeats quicken at the sight once again of someone we can actually remember, vividly, as a child: a connection to a bright, lost world.

every time we go home it will seem less like a home, and that last year of high school and that last summer before college will seem like a different country that no longer exists; a blip, an experiment, something that we'll always wish had been more. and we'll have thoughts like this for years and years afterward, even though it seems silly to mourn for something like that as adulthood comes on.

but there was something to it, those days we shared just as we were coming into our own as people: just as we all started to get cars and go out to breakfast on pretty spring mornings and go out to movies on prettier spring nights. i turned twenty today.