Every time I scroll through my photo album, it feels like falling into a rabbit hole — fully immersed in the memory, trying to imagine what state of mind I was in back then.
And I often get this strange feeling —
Rationally, I know those things happened, that I had lived through them; But emotionally, it almost feels like they never did.
Time, once so rigid while living it, turns strangely fluid the moment it becomes memory. — The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dalí
Time, Rearranged
It’s not that I’ve forgotten; it’s more like a kind of disconnection.
Like I know that was me, but at the same time, it doesn’t really feel like me anymore. （跟过去的自己【脱钩】）
Everything is clear, but at the same time distant and unfamiliar, like there’s a thin layer of fog in between.
And it doesn’t even take that long — Sometimes it’s just things from a month ago, or even a few weeks ago, and they already feel quite far away.
It’s not like something dramatic happened every day. Most days were just… days.
But somehow, time feels stretched in retrospect, and those moments already belong to a past version of me.
From There, to Here
And because of that, a lot of things that felt huge and incredibly hard at the time, now seem surprisingly light.
It’s not that they didn’t matter; it’s just that I’m no longer standing in the same place from which I saw the world back then.
Looking back, everything feels calmer and flatter.
回看射雕处，千里暮云平
So perhaps, the things that feel impossible to get through right now — the anxiety, the frustration, the things that feel stuck… Maybe in a few months, or even just weeks, I’ll look back and realize they’ve already been left behind, stored in an older version of myself.
Moving Forward
Of course, as the lyrics go —
There’s always going to be another mountain, and I’m always going to make it move.
You get over one thing, and there’s always another one waiting.
This is a journey without an endpoint. Maybe the only way is to simply to keep going, one step at a time, and see what life will bring.