The Arctic Monkeys
Traveling has a way of melting your memory and reinventing your history. As you rush through different spaces and places, you shift from one standpoint to the other with seamless ease and natural adaptation. It soon becomes a question of finding not the perfect path, but the perfect fit for your ideals, ideas and goals.
Kaleidoscopic me
The search of self is only an excuse to roam about the side tracks and unpredictable ways of life. One day it's a straight line, another day it's a hyperbolic curve, or a spiral a week later. These unintended shapes and pathways integrated in the miscalculated outlooks we bear break down the core of who we originally were. Life becomes a fractal: a pattern that explodes into multiple directions and that loses its meaning under several and repeated readings and starting points.
But interestingly, there is convergence of actions and movements towards the same original centre. The same way petals always sprout from the bulb of a sunflower, everything that we do, no matter how disoriented, roots back into the seed that stays within us. It's only that the people we meet at certain times and certain spaces keep an image of us that immediately becomes outdated the moment we leave and move on.
Memory in sharding
This is precisely why keeping in touch is such an important stepping stone for our identity. It's all about checking that the scattered pieces still fit into our mental puzzle without breaking down our perceived unity. Is the experience that I had with person Z in line with what I'm doing in place Y? Will the things that I learn in place B help me link back to what I used to do with person A? The interrogations never cease and keep producing more sub-categorisations, taking more of our internal energy as we go.
Yet, none of this is apparent to the external eye. As long as people recognise your personality and behaviours, you are still who you are in their minds. They will keep telling that story of how you disappeared into an unknown country when you were 21, the same way they see you look into the future and make further plans to walkabout. What they don't see is that the younger you and the current you are far more disconnected than the narrative that they tell. The early experimentation has turned into deliberate exploration.
It's only much later, down the fractured trenches, as the fields mount into the dead bodies of your rotten history, that you will be able to see the grand design. The patterns that you traced, the shapes that were left under every shortcut you made. These are your signature: the information you traded while undergoing identification checks.
