Impossible Life

We went out for dinner (our excuse was that I have finally done my placement test and have most of my schedule for the coming year sorted out) - it was an Ethiopian/Eritrean restaurant. The food was delicious; we ate it by picking it up with pieces of pancake-like bread. It's fun to eat with your hands and have it be proper.

The restaurant is in Cambridge, around the area where we lived until I was about five or six. It's a little strange being around there because I feel a strange familiarity, yet also a disconnect - it's the first place I knew, but I don't really know it as well anymore. Almost like déjà-vu. I know the way the streets connect but I no longer know the contents. I know the skeleton, but not the sinew.

And as we stepped out of the little, low-lit restaurant, my world was full of impossibles: the air was impossibly muggy; the lights of Mass Ave impossibly bright; the crescent-but-fading-to-gibbous moon looking impossibly close; the sky impossibly, deeply blue, as it is when twilight begins fading to night; parts of the place, like the grass in front of City Hall and the Post Office, impossibly familiar, so familiar that it's like I never left, and yet so many places so impossibly different and strange.

Suddenly I was struck by the impossibility of my world; the infinite paths that could have been taken. The precariousness of everything. It is all impossible. As the Doctor says, we're all stories. "We're all stories in the end." That's how impossible we are.

In the middle of Crash Course

It was dinnertime.

Me: But I was just in the middle of learning history!
Mom: Ugh. Just because your family wants you to eat dinner with them.
Mom: I suggest you fire them.