Change.
What other word gets bandied about for whatever purpose people choose to use it – negative and positive depending how you choose to utter it. Feared and longed for. ‘You’ve changed’/’I really need a change’.

When reading science or philosophy, everything appears to be in constant flow so nothing stays ever concretely the same. What does it mean to change? Is it the faded vertical line that starts to dig deeper into my face when I smile, 1 centimeter from the start of my right eyebrow? I start to notice it in my pictures and wonder if that’s the same face I see in the mirror, the same face I have in mind when I think of myself.

Is it the object that falls with a noise on the floor of the house I lived most of my life? I used to turn and just instinctively leave anything on the basin while I was getting ready. How did I just miss those few centimeters?  Is it the change in domicile that also makes me look for the switch for a while in the same room that I used to know where to touch it as soon as I pulled the covers away?

The Hopper calendar on my bedroom wall in the place I still call home but now only spend a handful of days a year is still showing the same month and year as the day I left. It’s the same page stuck on the same wall that is still pink, a colour which my dad still doesn’t like, and yet there’s nothing for me that holds more change within. Since I put that calendar up on that wall, my life has seen nothing but change.

Each change an entry and mark on my life calendar, some dates scribbled on so badly that the ink seeps through the pages ahead. Moving dates – some with anxious planning handwriting, some with eagerness and anticipation, others on wrinkled, dried up pages. ‘Save the date’ for people pages – some of them creeping up again and again, some of them single entries, others erratic, appearing here and there but always constantly found on dog-eared pages, some repeating and then ending abruptly with a smudge. ‘Starting new’ dates – jobs, internships, gyms, resolutions, most of them have seen their finishing line long ago. Dates marked in bright colours, 12 stamps on my life passport I didn’t have until 4 years ago. How could I get to today’s page and be the same person as the one that bought the calendar and put it up on that wall?

And yet I look up tonight on the Chop Suey picture hanging from a nail on the wall above my head, a bit ripped on the edges – the back of it marks the month of March 2008.