Open System

snow & clouds, by Diana Kimball.

The decade started on a beige eMachine, in my bedroom, at twelve years old. I feel really dumb writing to a computer about my life, but I guess it should be worth something someday. This journal entry still sleeps on my silver laptop, carried by floppies and compact discs and firewire to today—living in the same flat file as letters I wrote last week. And that’s amazing, that the residue of the past ten years can already be history, can rustle against the present.

So many surges of novelty have sunk into normalcy! Information in the air, becoming and then unbecoming a teenager. Arial Narrow (my eMachine font of choice) into Times New Roman (school papers) into Helvetica (a post-paper world.) Straight hair down to my shoulder blades at twelve, and even that was a change from before.

This year, too—the scope feels hysterically improbable. I started and finished my thesis between January and March, took photographs, flew to Texas. In June, I graduated from college and moved to the opposite side of the country. In September, my brother suddenly died. Today, even the shock of that has subdued into something familiar.

All the while, trying to gently persist in an open system—haltingly, hopefully, these arcs all unbounded by the same volume of time.