janradder

At the Minnesota Zoo there's an aquarium located beneath the tropical exhibit. To get there you walk down a ramp that descends through darkness until you reach the light of the tank. Inside the tank are hundreds of fish and sharks that swim, circle, and dart through the crystal clear water that's been obscured by the countless fingerprints and face-smudges of children, babies and even adults. If you sit on one of the benches or on the carpeted floor and watch, after a while you'll notice that some of the fish slowly change colors as they swim by. And if you look longer, you might even see one of them snap its tail and switch from a light silver to a dark blue in less than a second. You'll watch it swim off and wonder to yourself if perhaps you didn't imagine it, that it was always that way.

For me, change can seem like that at times. I'll be moving through my life and then I look up and everything is different somehow and I don't know why. It's almost as if my very cell structure has changed, but just barely, or like I've been switched into a new world where everything is exactly the same except that the colors are just a vaguely different hue and the smells are perhaps a bit sharper or more muted and everything I touch seems to have the minutest difference in texture. I look at my new world and I wonder what exactly changed and how and why, and I try to adjust to my new surroundings. Sometimes I can trace the change back to an event or a moment, but many times as far as I can tell there was no event, it's just that things are different now. And whether that's for bad or good, it's always a bit unsettling.

I wonder if those fish feel the same way, swimming along and now not only are they changed, but their world as well. Do they look around and wondered what happened, and do they now feel unbalanced as a result? They say our cells replace themselves every seven years so that the physical body we have now really isn't the same as the one we had years before. Is it that seemingly imperceptible renewal of our organic selves that I feel? Or is it something else. All I know is that in the days that follow there's always a hint of melancholy that hangs above me and I feel a little raw until I finally adjust and that which is new is once again old.