time is a staircase.

I went to wrap myself up before going into the 15 degree weather. I go through the mental checklist: layers of tights, socks, two sweaters, waterproof gloves, and my coat. The first snow I’ve ever fully faced, as an adult. It feels both novel, and just a day with tasks to complete to finish.

I zipped into my coat, and walked into a room that didn’t belong to me. My favorite Reddit post recently was this person checked in to a hotel, only to enter and find someone else sleeping with all of their things about the room.

I’ve wondered recently, watching the tech industry undergo its’ cycles of transformation, gain, and loss. Building companies that disrupt into legacy giants that give a return on investment, and eventually fall into a ‘disreputable bureaucratic’ business themselves.

We are destined to become the things that have shaped us, and some moments in time, we see ourselves in the life of others. An entrance into an occupied room.

When I was zipping up my coat, I thought of my mom. An image of her, bundled up in a similar grayscale coat holding me. I grew up in the freezing cold mountains of Southern California, in a town called Running Springs that people know as the first exit on the way to ski town.

After their divorce and before my middle school started, my mom transplanted us to the desert. I remember asking myself, ‘was there anything ever so bad about the cold?’. I missed it. The feeling of always being on the edge of survival, the coldness always seeping in where you’re unprepared.

Although I faced this first snow fully alone, I stepped into those rooms. I saw, on the other side of time, a brief glimpse of my mom in her younger years, feeling the cold I felt and deciding to chase the sun.

After a breakup with my first boyfriend, someone who I thought I would marry and I was deeply tied to, I sat on the porch in Oregon with my best friend and felt like my mom. I felt like everyone, at some point, often does.

I’m depressed, and know I might get better like everyone does, or not like the rest of them. The choice doesn’t matter, the paths have been walked by everyone alike.

To be human is this: you do not know your journey but you know the milestones, and you’ll see glimpses of everyone’s past in your future for the rest of your life. Whether you run away from something or lean into it, the force of it is still is exerted.

I leave my mom in the heat, who has left the mountains because of the cold, so I can sit in the cold remensce about the heat. Sometimes we break things just to prove something in our world can go our way.

There are streets underlaying the human experience, and it feels like I’ve seen every one of them. Time is a circle, and we’re rebuilding empires to fall again. I don’t know why we do this.

I’ve been thinking about this while thinking about my purpose, my meaning, my reason to pretend to integrate into the world like the rest of us do. I’ve returned with nothing but the realization that our lives are just different reflections, different rooms, different streets on the same land.

What do we do? Why are we here? I don’t fucking know. Maybe because we build structures around our suffering and progress and tear them down to rebuild them, because we don’t want to figure out why there’s an empty space to hold that structure in the first place.

Maybe, our circular nature provides a purpose to us. Our purpose is to build things, destroy, build things, destroy. Sometimes, we chase the shadows that were cast over us enough to see them dissipate in the light of our new eyes.

And then we wait for the shadows to settle over us again.