I never made a habit of revisiting places. I feel too young to go back, when there is so much I haven’t seen yet. Yet, going back somewhere I know I’ve been to before is as close as one gets to time travel. I think.
Imagine this — you sit in a café drinking wine and chain-smoking cigarettes next to a beautiful girl in utter bliss and have a notion that you must have walked past the café a decade ago. Which to a 20-something year old person is another lifetime ago. For me, it’s a past that I have almost forgotten. Long ago, before I met the best of my friends or the first girl, that I truly loved. The memories of such places have a peculiar way of emerging in the most random of moments. As I was walking on La Rambla in Barcelona, I remembered how one of my mates from high school got pranked by a local driver sending him to the ground from a street pole. All to a grand amusement of a group of disorderly teenagers including myself. However, I have no idea who that person was specifically or where exactly on La Rambla this happened. Walking through Barcelona I get these kinds of hunches quite often.