There are four started and unfinished blog posts sitting in the column to the left of the window I’m typing in. Three of them have titles. One of them doesn’t. I don’t know why it doesn't. I like titles. They always mean something to me, even if that meaning doesn’t come across to others.

It’s been over two years since the last time I posted something here. I don’t know why I temporarily abandoned writing. I still wrote in my head. Sometimes I even scribbled in a notebook. And, according to the column to the left of the window I’m typing in, I even started to type some stuff. But I didn’t finish anything. Something that was such a large part of the last twenty years of my life went away and I just let it go. For awhile. For too long.

Facebook memories unearthed an old post, written in the lead up to Christmas sixteen years ago, dwelling on a hangover and a journey and somehow providing a sort of narrative to a life not unremarkable though not terribly remarkable at the same time. The details of what happened, what I was able to recall, shine a great deal brighter than my days these days do.

Field Notes notebooks (of which I own many but rarely use) have a tagline, “I’m not writing it down to remember it later, I’m writing it down to remember it now.” I’m fond of the quote, and I’ve used it myself over the years (never claiming credit for it though). But looking at my sparse scribblings over the years, and those unfinished essays and stories and reminiscences, I believe it now more than ever. Those two years have slipped by and whilst I can piece them together, it’s not quite the same.

Perhaps there’s some stuff in those two years I didn’t want to remember. Perhaps I lost something or got distracted by something or wasn’t where I wanted to be. Perhaps I was scared that if I wrote it down, I would have to do something about it, and after my dad dying and my best friend dying and covid and everything else I just didn’t want to have to do something about it. I don’t know. I probably won’t be certain of it until I start writing about it.

I do know that I want to start remembering again. That life has changed, in one remarkable respect, for the better for me. And that change is worth remembering, and chronicling. And that it’s time to start doing something about it.