Perhaps those of you who've lived in several different places or abroad for a while will identify with this. This complete transfer of existence from "Life in Wales" to, quite suddenly, "Life in Virginia", with "Former life in Georgia" and "Former life in Alabama" squished in between the change, has left me searching for a good metaphor to explain the feeling it's evoked.
I toyed around with the idea of "it's like a time warp" when I went back to Alabama to visit "my old college friends", who are not really my old college friends because I only went to college with a few of them and they're all much more than just friends to me. Even though a lot had changed, it felt almost seamless to slip back into the rhythm of that place and these people, belonging just as much as I ever did. Much more had changed in Georgia, though, the place of my roots and my family, and life in Virginia is almost completely new (not totally, I've spent a couple months in this area before), so the "time warp" theory just doesn't quite cut it.
But, being a lover of science fiction and all things otherwise weird, I persisted in that vein trying to explain my experience and I think I've come up with a decent metaphor.
Planes and wormholes. Not the flying planes (though those are fun too), the other kind of plane. I've been on several different planes of existence - life in Wales, VA, GA, AL, vacation life, and life with my parents - and I've been traveling from one to another via wormholes. Hence the eye-blinking suddenness of finding myself in each place and it feeling both natural and alien. I know automatically how to adjust to each, but it always leaves my brain saying, "hey, uh, what just happened? How did we get here? What now?"
Yes, it's weird metaphor. I'm weird. I feel weird.
Here's a picture of a bird.
I toyed around with the idea of "it's like a time warp" when I went back to Alabama to visit "my old college friends", who are not really my old college friends because I only went to college with a few of them and they're all much more than just friends to me. Even though a lot had changed, it felt almost seamless to slip back into the rhythm of that place and these people, belonging just as much as I ever did. Much more had changed in Georgia, though, the place of my roots and my family, and life in Virginia is almost completely new (not totally, I've spent a couple months in this area before), so the "time warp" theory just doesn't quite cut it.
But, being a lover of science fiction and all things otherwise weird, I persisted in that vein trying to explain my experience and I think I've come up with a decent metaphor.
Planes and wormholes. Not the flying planes (though those are fun too), the other kind of plane. I've been on several different planes of existence - life in Wales, VA, GA, AL, vacation life, and life with my parents - and I've been traveling from one to another via wormholes. Hence the eye-blinking suddenness of finding myself in each place and it feeling both natural and alien. I know automatically how to adjust to each, but it always leaves my brain saying, "hey, uh, what just happened? How did we get here? What now?"
Yes, it's weird metaphor. I'm weird. I feel weird.
Here's a picture of a bird.
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