My bathroom calendar didn't prepare me for this.

After a 24 hours of travel, I am now back in California feeling appropriately strange after having spent a year on another continent, with just one stateside visit over Christmas. It's been a while, and I found myself searching for the flush handle on the toilet at my parents' house because it of course isn't a plastic button to push on top, like I'm now used to. Welkom in Amerika!

The night before I left Amsterdam, my boyfriend finished reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig's popular 1974 philosophical memoir. He closed the book and sat there quietly watching me pack up all my things, my face red and tear-stained from a few emotional goodbyes earlier that evening. It was hard for us not to be nostalgic as we thought about our time in Amsterdam together and separately. It's been his home all his life, and now having finished school, he'll be traveling and living out of a backpack indefinitely so he's got some goodbyes to say too.

I told him I'd rather not think about any of it if I can help it, that leaving is hard enough as it is and I can't be getting all choked up over good times that ended too soon. Then he reached for his book again and showed me the beginning of Pirsig's afterward about the ancient Greek view of time.

They saw the future as something that came upon them from behind their backs with the past receding away before their eyes.

When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one. Who really can face the future? All you can do is project from the past, even when the past shows that such projections are often wrong. And who really can forget the past? What else is there to know?

I wonder if the Greek say anything about how fast the future comes upon you from behind your back. Do they mention how even with a calendar hanging over your toilet, a countdown widget on your dashboard, and every rational molecule in your brain reminding you that time is passing, that September is here, you'll still be blindsided, rammed and plowed over by the future?

But it's here. It's September. My year of few responsibilities and European escapades has come to a close, and I'm back in the States getting dangerously close to decision-making time. How the hell did that happen?

I guess all I can do for now is take baby steps backwards into the future, blindly groping for the best choice, the best opportunity, and hope I don't trip on the way. And I suppose I'll allow myself a little nostalgia. The memories of my past are fond, and they deserve some attention.