Self Portrait Tuesday

 
There are always those times when you attach a huge significance to a certain date. It resonates in your head for months in anticipation. You don't have to stop and think in order to answer a question like "when do you leave?" And then the same thing happens with the day you come back.

And then you find yourself four years later thinking, has it really been four years? And when did I leave again? And the date is gone. You pull out your notebook from January 2002. You flip through days that sound vaguely familiar, like something you once read in a book.

And if you open the photograph album and see the house you once lived in for three months, it looks only familiar.

Until you remember that you only took it on your last day, on your way to the High Street Kensington tube station with your backpack on an April morning. That the park was at your back and to one side of the building was the line of visa applicants outside the Dutch embassy. Until you remember what you kept in your kitchen cabinets, and the feel of the wallpaper, and the step up to the bathroom, and talking on the phone at the bottom of the stairs, and pulling the couch out on to the balcony on a warm day.