Travels Alone and Lost Memories

One of my biggest regrets, perhaps my only real regret, was not marking up the atlas I carried (remember, this was before smartphones) and, more importantly, keeping the actual atlas that accompanied my yearlong walkabout.

For the whole year I have three, maybe four, rolls of film. Pictures did not capture the journey and the journal(s) I kept is gibberish, more a hashing out of the madness in my head than it was about capturing the externals of my journey.  

So what's left is memory and my memory is growing faultier and dimmer each year, pricked only by reminders of 'Hey, I was there' when I see it in some medium and it fills me with a tinge of sadness that I had no one to share it with and lack the language or artifacts to display the experience.

It changed me but I lack the words to explain exactly how.

It reminds me of a particular line from this song (which is a significant song as I had a revelatory experience while lying on the floor high as can be digesting each lyrics as if she was singing it only to me; I was in love).

"But she knows this and she smiles
For she has miles and miles of memories all to herself
Everything in between then and now
And all the images of everything in between now and then
And all they have
Are pictures..."

Jenny I Read - Concrete Blonde