yes, go, go...

for a long string of months my flashbacks have been looping through a single three week section of my semi-recent history. blips of Eastern Europe--its food, its weather, its languages--crowd my memory.

the streets and skylines of Budapest and Bratislava...

so many days we spent cozying up with Budapest. and then buying cheap ice cream cones from every streetcorner vendor in Bratislava....

trying and imagining we could manage to shake the tourist vibe at least a little bit.

haggling helplessly with Romanian women at the bakery in Sighişoara.

coffeeshops and cathedrals. everso shy snatches of German. endlessly perplexed eavesdropping, all over Vienna.

but now, after nearly two years since the seedling idea of that trip was planted in my head, its flashback loop is being infiltrated by and remixed with other further-past memory scenes: the last time I was in England... 

airports and train stations. platforms, terminals, tickets, timetables.

layovers in California. January sun and shore.

Hawaii sand and sunburns.

before that, Canada.

Celsius, scriptures, and snow.

such a comfortable, tight routine that was. such a dear, irreplaceable microcosm.

how the sequences of these travel- and place-themed flashbacks are arranged inside my brain, I don't know. there is no recognizable order to it. I can never tell what will remind me of when. all of it reminds me, subtly, that here and now don't have to be exactly here and now. I'm incredibly lucky to have access beyond my little academic slice of Indiana, to then and there and elsewhere.

soon it'll be this particular elsewhere. I am going to Paris next week.

{ photo borrowed from this kind soul on tumblr. }

what will France add to my mixed flashback-reel? which vividnesses will I fruitlessly long for as I move non-flashingly forward through time in the normal fashion? what kinds of faces and voices and scenery will join the everywhere and everywhen I've already collected?