I think I have just passed through a gateway.

I have mentioned this weird phenomenon before and it’s very difficult to explain.

I live my life and everything is running reasonably smoothly and when suddenly I realise that everything is subtly different in a way that I can’t quite put my finger on.  My life now is just different from how it was a few months ago.  I can’t really say what those differences are.  It’s not like I won the Lottery or have made any changes to my lifestyle.  There haven’t been any external influences so the change is somehow internal.

They say that the human body changes completely every seven years or so.  Cells die and are replaced, and over the seven year period every single cell will have replaced itself.  So you are literally not the person you once were.  My theory is that those little buggers that constitute my body have formed a malicious union and have decided to do all the cell changes at once and thus create a new me overnight.  The only flaw in my theory is that there would have to be one hell of a pile of dust and dead cells lying somewhere?  There again, the bedroom could do with a turn of the vacuum cleaner….

As part of this phenomenon, when I look back on my life there are things I know I did, but I cannot believe that I did them.  I can look at a photograph of a five year old on a beach and know that it’s me, but I cannot believe that I am that person.  I look at my feet and it is impossible that they are the same feet that stood on that beach.  I have just passed through so many gateways that the younger me and myself are two different people altogether.

The modern me never went to school.  That was some other little brat.  The modern me never went through a lovely drug and alcohol induced haze of college days.  That was some other lucky fucker.  It’s only later, maybe heading into my married period that I begin to realise that yes, maybe I was there but I was physically a completely different person then.  The more I approach the present, the more I realise that I was indeed the same person as my memory recalls.

Fuck.

I think I’m cracking up.