It’s been two months since I arrived in Utrecht after an abrupt lockdown in Jeddah for 7 months. It was (/is) so surreal to be back here. Suddenly, I was (mentally) sent back in time – the places, the memories, the scents, the scenes… Thoughts I thought I had ‘gotten over’ simply resurrected themselves out of things. Automatic behaviors that I forgot, suddenly were reflexive out of nothing.
How many times have I been here before? Feeling like this? Thinking like this? How many times did history ‘repeat itself’? Then are we really just running in circles? Routines. Habits. Reactions. Patterns.
Lately, I could not stop this spinning in my head ‘am I just stuck in a loop? same old same old?’ But something must be different this time. Something new. Earth and its sisters don’t merely revolve around the sun forever; the sun travels and they spiral about it. The end of the circle is always displaced from the beginning. Even if it’s infinitesimally small, you never end up back where you started.
This must be it! All I have to do is to push a little, spiral up and not down. Spin closer to myself, not farther. Even if it feels useless, that I’m just ‘back where I started’, there must be something I’m missing. Because even if out in the world it seems so, at least something within must be different now.
