The Fleeting.

The window's are open, and the taxi is blaring Britney. The night sky is lit by street lamps and drivers swerve eerily ahead - young kids home from college, reunited by alcohol and the freedom of summer. I have my right elbow hanging in the wind and for a moment I feel a memory-glimmer: It is of the Philippines, of coming home in the dark by tricykad as the wind mingles with ocean-scent. The driver is hunched over the motor, his flip flops floor the gas and his tank top flaps, flag-like. I feel the noisy engine robbing me of stressed shoulders and a tense back. It is all that can be heard. Perhaps I had just had a beer or two with my sitemate, perhaps I had just been whiling away the hours on my laptop at the one coffee shop in town, enjoying the quiet normalcy of air-conditioning and brewed coffee.

In this memory, I know I was happy. Alone, on my own in a self-dug world-niche, my heart is high on freedom and that feeling of oneness with my solid self.

This feeling, right now... it is not the same. Not at all. The rows of suburbia strangle me and the college kids relate only to a former self. Wide streets gape, blinking lights intrude...they seem to say, "Why are you up so late? We timed these signals for you, but we admonish your need for them."

The memory-glimmer makes me sad, but I tell myself that life's next stage will hark the return of that pride, that addictive sense of self.

New Orleans is up next in Julie's stages of life. I hope that the small space I create for myself in the city will bring that fleeting exhilaration back... otherwise I know that I will be craving it forever.