Portkeys

It amazes me how the slightest nuances within a tune, a scent, even light - can carry me to some other place in memory entirely. Our senses are so often both greatly and gently affected by the tiniest fractures from our surroundings, by the acute aspects that rarely register in the center of the moment. Somehow or rather they tend to come and embrace us in the most random places, bearing along reminders of some far off state. They become an embodiment of time, anchors and keys for past incidents and past people.

I could be walking along Hyde Park and be hit by the canary sunshine that's so significant for the long, warm afternoons back in the wooden halls of my kampung in Raub. I could be traipsing up the escalator in Holborn and hear the strums of a busker singing his heart out to One Republic's Counting Stars, taking me two years back to autumn strolls in Sydney. I could be ambling through the crowds in Bayswater, catch a whiff of patchouli oil and be reminded of the reverbirating stillness in Ramadhan mosques.

Then there's the recollections of people, of laughter, of warmth - the slightest gesture, the hint of a smile, the silhouette of a stranger - wrapped up tight with a pang of either lost and fondness. Having spread my dispositions and physical self onto so many concrete pavements and so many wavering skies across the globe, it's little surprise that there's essences that I've exchanged, parts of myself I've left onto acquaintances, fragments of them that's been scattered over to me. They are the sort of events that we keep as personal reflections, unaware of it's influential magnitude.

I find the idea of having pieces of the world intermingled with one's self a comforting thought, because no matter our location or mental bearing, there'll always be someone else out there that's connected to me, irregardless of degree.