FAQ: Why are these called “Rambles”? Because I like the double meaning of “ramble”: 1) an unstructured rant and 2) a pleasant walk. Long, leisurely strolls are the midwives of good ideas, so I decided to publish what I write on my Notes app while outside, making them irresistibly candid and personal while giving a glimpse into how I write.
We see the world through memories. We understand things to the capacity that we have made sense of them in the past. We understand people to the extent we understand ourselves. Sometimes, I don’t feel grown up at all, when an old problem arises in the form of a new situation, I feel like I hide inside myself like a girl who’s broken in through the window.
We store our precious memories in a box, sealed and gently tucked away, scared to revisit them too often since they lose a bit of their clarity every time they’re looked at. Time doesn’t promise maturity, but it encourages thoughtfulness. And after a certain age, all our memories become so intertwined with one another that the specifics of movies watched or books read become inconsequential; our perspective is no longer virginal. With age, we start finding ourselves everywhere. We find that we have hid ourselves in a certain perfume, a particular café, or an intersection in the city at a specific time of the day. A whiff of a long-forgotten smell can intoxicate us. Finding an old shirt can make us burst into tears. For the imagination, everything becomes fertile, everything becomes dangerous.
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