This side of paradise

November. Sunday. Salzburg. I enter the final year of my twenties. Evening, and I find myself wandering alone into a cathedral, where shortly, a Mass commences, and Mozart’s Requiem exults from above in full choral glory. 

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That day became an image that intermittently appeared in my mind, usually during my quiet moments. A few nights ago, out of no particular boredom I took out my notebook and scribbled down the dates, Nov. 1999 – Nov. 2009. My twenties. 

What was I like when I was twenty, what hopes had I held on to then, I wondered. How did those years disappear, one by one, from one into another, and into yet another, and the images came like trailers of a film. 

I divided the pages into years, and in rough chronological order scribbled down some of my lesser milestones and more significant days. When I finished I was rather struck. Some events and names stood out more than the others, like stars in the night sky, where if you concentrate long and hard enough, the stars will begin to take shape. Some people interpret their starsigns this way. 

How would I have foreseen those random acts and casual decisions leading me to that particular corner, to befriending this initial stranger, and then turning me into this unrecognisable person? The transformations have been variegated, intellectual, aesthetic, literary, political, unimaginable. Erase a phrase or a word from those pages, as if they hadn’t occurred – took two years to forget B (2000), or, Operation, entirely weak and voiceless (2002), or, off to Melbourne (2003), or, read Winterson (2005), or, X. (2006) – and a piece would be missing, and I wouldn’t be complete, I wouldn’t be me even, standing on this ground.

How would I ever be able to make sense of all this, other than to hold onto this firmament of a decade in helpless awe and amazement? 

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I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise