I. Nothing is better at compression than the human memory. With memory, time moves fast — faster than wind, faster than light, faster than anything. It disguises itself as slow yet it never decelerates. Therein lies the problem. I'm writing this from an apartment overlooking the Tagus river, mum & dad asleep in the next room. Coincidentally, the first time we were in Europe five years ago, this neighbourhood was where our journey began, with a fado performance over dinner. Four weeks ago, my parents landed in Paris, looking towards adventures without any idea of what we were going to do. Four weeks later, we have flights in opposing directions; the same neighbourhood in Lisbon is where this particular journey comes to an end. Nowadays I only hold a dim awareness that my person four years ago — the one who first travelled these places — is somehow related to who I am today. The distance is just too great. It doesn't feel like the four years just slipped by as it does the four years just didn't *happen*. Blame COVID, blame the inevitable passage of time, whatever. Life currently feels so different from what I was doing four months ago, let alone four years. II. Senior summer is a great — a *great* — time. I spent most of it away, hanging out with college-aged people and adults. That part was good — it made me grow up quickly, and it showed me 18 is an absurdly young age — but a small part of me wishes I had stayed back. Senior summer grants three months of absolutely no responsibility. You move into college at some point, but at the outset, it sure does feel like a lot of time to make memories — even if I only got a little bit of that time, I still loved it. One of the things Dua texted me that stuck[^1] was in the middle of the summer: >Not a problem at all - it’s hard to believe that grad was almost 80 days ago, Piknic Electronik was almost 70 days ago, Savar and I caught 2 fish nearly 60 days ago, I day tripped to Montreal exactly 50 days ago, we had lunch with Savar’s mom, went golfing, and did an escape room nearly 40 days ago, and were in Vermont 3 weeks ago… When I received that text, I realised time had run out. The daytrips, the verbiage, the Scrabble, the scrambles, the Starbucks. III. The increasing irreproducibility of opportunities is one of the things I fear most, and one of the most core parts of growing up. The younger you are, the more time you have; the more sure you can be that something will prove itself iterative down the line. My parents kept repeating this trip may be the last time we go to Europe together; they know — and I know — I probably have Europe travel on my horizons nonetheless. A confession: growing up watching high school movies, I really looked forward to a fictional high school experience. I wanted to pass notes, go for drives, and really hit it off with some strangers at a football game's afterparty. A few features of my life did not precisely align with fiction: the IB, boys-only school, and most importantly, the fact I was too much of a nerd for anything. I still can't drive, so I'm not totally sure what I was expecting at 14. One of my most recent, most unexpected feelings of longing has been the realisation I'll never actually get that unrealistic high school experience. The high school chapter is done, written, closed; I aged while the characters didn't. IV. Our last night was spent in a little restaurant with low arched ceilings. The fado singer started her second set at 10:30pm. The room was nearly empty; most tourists satiated by the first set. She smiled at her son, running around behind her, between songs. By the fourth song, her smile was gone, her eyes closed. All links to the present were severed. At that point, time had flattened to become a lake, and she was traversing it as if with Providence. Two centuries' worth of tradition filled the room, traditions eroded by time & renewed by modern practice. The already written chapters were being read out loud; appearances seemed to fall away in relevance until all that remained were things we could feel. The singer's eyes didn't open, lost in the web she had spun. Her son looked on, completely connected to his mother, even if for just the most fleeting of moments in time. [^1]: Most texts are either publishable on a blog or stick with me (i.e not purged forcibly by my memory/Messenger). This is a rare intersection.