And so...

...life goes on. I come back to this place and look around, at what I created years ago, and filled, in my naivest and most un-self-conscious moments. What brought me back? An email alert for a comment from a stranger on a post I wrote ages ago--he calls me incredibly stupid, this person I don't know from a country I have never visited. My own coldness and lack of reaction to this surprises me. All I really feel is puzzlement, and curiosity. For a few seconds, I stare at the comment, wondering how I should react, what I should feel. Should I delete it? It's insulting and completely unnecessary addition to a space I consider my own. Yet, I cannot bring myself to hit the delete button. I re-read this post, one that seems to me to have been written in a different lifetime, by a different person. It is kind of stupid, I begin to tell myself and then I stop. This is who I was. I'm not going to judge myself, just because this person did so. This person who randomly comments on an old post in the blog of a person he doesn't know and cannot understand. This person who has taken the effort to actually type all that out, only to say something that makes no meaningful contribution to... well, anything. I visit his blog, and realize that even if I wanted to, I could't come up with a vicious retort on his post because it's almost like we're from different species and he's rambling on and on about things that simply don't interest me, the everyday minutiae of his average married (American?) life.

But life does go on. We grow up, we look back, and I, for one, read old comments from friends who are now strangers, strangers who are now friends, and random disturbing people who waltz into your life for short intense periods and disappear forever. We struggle with ordinary, everyday things and we celebrate, we cry, we discover music and we write blog posts. One day, maybe I'll read my own, now juvenile-seeming blog posts and be at a complete loss for things to say. One day, our past selves will be strangers to our present selves. All the pangs we feel for broken romances and broken friendships, the unexpected turns of life, the stomach-clawing excitements, the breath-stealing sorrows, will all just be distant memories and would make about as much sense to our future selves as the blog of this random stranger did to me.