One Step

One step out the door this morning, and the breath caught in my lungs. One glance at the grey sky and soft drizzle. One breath of that sweet, rainy air. One moment is all it took to ricochet me back a little under a year. In that one moment, every emotion came rushing back. Every memory that I had tried so hard to avoid.

In an instant, the world had spun backward and I was taking a walk in the drizzle, beaming with the happiness of what had taken place. And the smell, the sickeningly sweet fragrance that I will never be able to forget...it hung in the air, it fell from the trees, it cascaded with the tiny droplets hitting everything from above.

My head was reeling, then and now. I covered my face with my hands and just stood there. Minutes passed, people walked around me, the moisture from the air continued to collect on my clothes, the cold buried itself within my flesh until I was shivering, but the thoughts still wouldn't stop. Or perhaps I didn't want them to. Maybe what I wanted most was to remember everything that happened that day, every vivid detail, every sensation, emotion, realization.

That's the beauty of a year--the seasons go full-circle, and everything comes back to the way it was, only 365 days later. Some things change, but others never do...they always stay the same. That smell...that smell would never go away, it would follow me every spring under the grey sky and remind me of what had happened.

Is it nostalgia? Is it wistful longing for what I had then? Is it everything I was clinging to and trying to remember? Or every instant that I was trying to forget? In one step, I had gone from where I was, to where I had been. In that one step, I went back a year in my life, forgot everything that had happened since then, and let myself float away in memory, if only for the few minutes that I stood there, everything turning around me on its normal course.