Audio Time Travel

I was scanning through my iTunes library tonight and happened upon an entire year's worth of the voice memos recorded on my iPod. Tossed in with my music were the interviews I've conducted for my job over the past months. There were a couple freelance assignment interviews interspersed, among many mistakenly recorded moments in the car or office. I'm nearing my one-year-in-this-job anniversary. What happenstance that I stumbled upon this audio scrapbook of my pilgrimage. In the span of an hour, I've re-lived the moments, people and conversations that have left traces on me. It is a privilege to get to re-enter into each one: to remember the beginner's nerves, to hear the light bulbs go off in my head and recall how life-giving each encounter was.

I had a similarly eerie moment the day I found an old cassette tape under my bed a few years ago. I sat indian-style in the corner of my childhood room, put the unlabeled tape into my boombox and leaned in close to hear my teeny tiny voice, singing and speaking quietly -- almost inaudibly. I spoke softly, as though locking up my whispers into a plastic sound vault. The little girl behind the tape had sat on the very same carpet upon which I sat a decade or more later, throwing open the door to her secrets.

There are moments when I am washed over with the reality that I am the little girl -- that she is me. Reading old journals has the same effect on me. I'm often doubled over with the truth that the writer of those pages is still very much a part of me. I will, years from now, look back on the words I write today, and marvel at how gracefully the metamorphosis continually occurs.