Reaching That Point...
Have you ever noticed that when you're sitting and pulling up memories it seems they're all infused with a golden glow? That even if a particular experience was bad you'll usually remember the best about it?
Time is the best and most effective eraser known to man. I can sit, close my eyes and throw the nets of my mind into my conscious and subconscious and the memories that are pulled up gleam like wiggling, silvery tropical fish. They reflect each other like prisms and scatter my thoughts in the same way but they're beautiful because they're mine.
Music and smells are amazing triggers, the whiff of sweat mixed with cologne brings back the images and tastes of my French boyfriend in Morocco in 1988, the feeling of his lips on my chest, the tautness of our bellies together. The mixed feelings of shame, guilt, lust and love. He was the first guy I'd ever had sex with and at age 17 it was such a terrifying and exhilarating experience, finally I was being true to who I was and maybe if I hadn't gone to Morocco that year I never would have. To this day I can smell him like it was yesterday.
Or the smell of sagebrush after a rainstorm in Colorado when I was a kid. Driving across that plain at the foothills of the San Juan mountains I'd see my family's ranch in the distance and smell that wet, sharp smell and I'd know my grandmother would be there, waiting for me. She'd always turn off the lights and burn kerosene lamps, because that was how she grew up. She'd cook deer meat and puffball mushrooms along with watercress she gathered herself and then she'd teach me to count in Choctaw, and the thunder would crash down around us and I'd sit in her lap and know that just that once I was safe, which wasn't a feeling I had often as a child.
I can hear a song, usually a big-room trance anthem and it all comes flooding back, the pounding bass, looking around me high on pills and seeing thousands of other revelers with their hands in the air and their heads back, letting the music take them to their own secret places. Or I'm sitting in Trade in London, snorting K with a transsexual and chatting with an off-duty marine from the Royal Navy.
For me the smell of eucalyptus reminds me of a Gatecrasher rave in South Africa and having a sweet South African kid ask me to hold him while he smoked cigarettes dipped in Tiger Balm. He wasn't gay and didn't care that I was, he just wanted someone to tell him that it was going to be alright, that everything was going to be OK. And even though I was in the middle of Joburg in an underground train station listening to Pete Tong and not looking forward to an 8:00 flight the next day to the Comoros Islands I held my arms out to him and we sat together, the gay American and the straight South African.
Those memories, indeed all memories are always tinged with sadness. Is it because we can never go back and even though the future holds such great promise we mourn for what we left behind? If you could would you undo the past, knowing that it would change who you are today?
11:02:06 PM 
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