The Number Field

I am struggling to find the right way to describe a particular sensation. When I first attempt to wrap words around it, flashback is the first one that comes to mind, but that isn’t really it. I am not Billy Pilgrim, I am not unstuck in time. The feeling I’m trying to get at is more ephemeral, like a fragment of a song that gets stuck in my head because I haven’t heard it all the way through, but instead of being auditory, it’s cast visually in front of my mind’s eye, as if I was transported back to that place for just a moment. The things I experience this way are usually in the form of an outdoor place that I’ve been many times before, but not typically somewhere that I would have considered memorable or even wanted to have permanently imprinted in my mind. Each moment lasts only a few seconds, a brief compositum of that specific place, pulled from the recesses of my brain and instantaneously painted back into my short-term memory.

I don’t remember when this all started. It might have been when I was a missionary in Russia, when I closed my eyes and saw my home or the campus where I had studied, but back then I certainly would have written it off as homesickness. When I had returned home after my mission, I thought they were just especially strong memories–the view from the bus stop on Dzerzhinskiy Pro’ezd, the icy pathway across the frozen pond in Sormovo, or the hall of the Babushkinskaya metro station–side effects of the culture shock. When I moved to attend graduate school, the location of the memories moved, most of them coming now from the place I had just left.

I was in Texas for so long that even the impressions of other places faded as I grew more distant in time from the places that they represented, and they weren’t replaced by new ones because it’s hard to feel nostalgia for things that you see every day. Since leaving there almost three years ago it appears that I’ve returned to the wanderers’ lifestyle, this time accompanied by a wife and children. The impressions still come vividly, but perhaps not as frequently as they used to. Now that we’ve been in England for some time, I’ve begun to notice a related sensation, but in the opposite direction–things around me that I used to notice because they were interesting, quaint, or charming, now make less of an impression because they have become a part of my everyday experience. It probably won’t be until we leave that I can capture all of that wonder again, as if it was new, surrounded by the haze of memory. I want that, as a reminder that no matter where I am or where I go, I still have with me the places that I’ve been before.