February flew past in a flash. March turned into to April and August no longer seems so far away. Snowflakes fell and still there was no sign of spring, but that didn’t stop me from looking forward. Spend! Travel! Explore new places. Book that next flight, take that next trip. Take a chance. It’s time to erase the past—or at least accept it for what it taught you. Everything eventually gets written up in the past tense, so tell it to a friend or note it down in a notebook and move on. In an age when relationships can last less than a month, it was astonishing to discover that someone I’d not seen in several lifetimes still wanted to know me, perhaps even love me. Life is like that. It moves like water in the rock-pools by a beach, swirling in with the tide, filling up and then emptying out. But the tide always returns. I’ve been thinking about my grandparents and where they used to live, down by the beach—a beach where we walked together, before they stopped taking walks. Perhaps it’s time I took a trip down there. The other day, I listened to the lyrics of a Beatles song for the very first time. It’s a song I’ve heard a dozen times before, but this time I really listened and the words made a lot more sense. I still have my doubts, though. The soundtrack for this post was provided by a band I last listened to almost a decade ago. Their new album is noise of a marginally more mature kind, and it was like looking in the mirror and reflecting on how we’d both changed—the artist and the listener. A week after Valentine’s Day, a pale-skinned girl I barely knew read to me from her journal, sharing secrets she’d never shared with anyone. By the end of the month, she was gone. It left me feeling strangely sad, so I drew a picture of Naomi Watts and then signed up to do an art class. I also read a book that made me think that in the future we may all be living on a raised island above a sea of jellymire. Otherwise, life will be much the same. It will consist of waking up in a sleeping sac before heading off to work, where we’ll have to put up with the tyrannical whims of a faceless boss. Our work will be akin to that of sweat-shop slaves, but with one key difference: instead of piecing together Nike shoes or Apple devices, we’ll be attaching chest plates and muscle strings, all the while battling confusing thoughts and memories of an existence we’re never quite sure was our own. Much the same way as we do now, I suppose. Perhaps this is why we write. Why we draw and paint and record our songs, and why we tell stories—however nonsensical they may seem. After all, what else is there to do?