Lost Time Capsules

I'm not sure what is happening lately but I seem to keep stumbling upon pieces of me.

They are scattered here and there and I thought they were gone but they still exist. They have just been hiding... like a treasure hunt waiting for me to find them again. I've found them in boxes, have dusted them of and have been exploring who, where and what I was when I came down with cancer.

The first things I found were my sketchbooks which opened up some thoughts and locked memories. The next thing I found were people who I had known then, just as I was doing my last 2 years at the university. It was odd. They were still where I had left them, although after some reacquainting I found they had continued their lives when I had disappeared to the hospital. They had completed their masters, traveled to Malaysia for a year and came back to complete a PHD. I shouldn't say, them, them is actually she.

This she, had done her masters thesis on women artists and had made a video of us discussing our work practices in regard to our being mothers. I remember it only faintly as it was at the beginning of when I didn't feel well.

I put that DVD in tonight and was surprised. There I was looking just like myself but in a striped top, pink Capri pants and runners. My hair is the same as I have it now and I look exactly like I do now (minus the pink pants).

I was convinced that the way I look now post cancer was just a shell of myself. I used to be pretty, I used to be smart but when watching that video I am still me. Thank God I'm still me.

These discoveries I'm making are like putting together a puzzle of my past. I felt so disconnected from it but now I feel my past and I are binding together. Whatever the result is, I now know I do not look like the mutated version of me that I carry around in my head. My view of myself seems to be distorted by what I've been through.