I just spent about an hour reading my writings from 1997. Or Book XXII, to be a bit more exact. To my discomfort, nearly everything I came across struck me as a tad foreign, distant, and perhaps even contrived. Actually, I occasionally had a feeling I was reading someone else’s rather than my own writings. I stopped at some point and tried to figure out what was going on. At first I thought about the time that separated 1997 and 2015, but then I realized it was less than twenty years all told. Not much, that is, and certainly not in terms of my own age. Only then it crossed my mind that I met my beloved a year later. Even though it took a while for me to decide to make yet another big move in my life, 1998 still marks a new phase in my mind. The present phase. Which is perhaps why my own writings from a year earlier now appear to me a bit odd. Ever-so-slightly so, but still. Be that as it may, no other explanation for my discomfort has come to me so far. After all, is there any other way to divide our time than in terms of those we love? The only trouble with this propensity of ours is that we tend to lose touch with ourselves across these divisions in our own lives. Three cheers for Book XXIII, though!