I had a flashback two days ago which forked in a fuzzy choose your own adventure kind of way. Two blocks up from where I live, there is a trail that weaves into the thick green forest of the Austin Hill Country. I took off late in the dusk of evening as the sun was growing deep red, so as to make the trek a little more melodramatic (What if I get lost? Huh? What then?). The path I was on runs for a quarter mile or so down the length of a row of houses next to the middle school, and then suddenly leaves you isolated from civilization, dropping steeply in a zig zag manner down one of side of the Barton Creek ridge. My feet felt light and quick as I skipped down the steps, avoiding a broken two-by-four here and there, constructed against a slice of rock which enabled the final plunge down to the creek.

All I had to do was keep throwing one foot out in front of the other. My breath sounded desperate. Raspy and rhythmic bursts of air turned to puffs of smoke around my flushed face. The crunch of rock and leaves echoed against the trees. The creek made noises louder, and then softer, and then louder along the trail where I was now running in the opposite direction, against the flow of water. The air was cold in my lungs and stung the back of my throat. The more I ran, the more the cold air seemed to clean my head of excess thought; I felt again, as I often do when I run, what it was like to be a kid.

When I emerged from the forest at trail exit, opposite the one which I had begun, it was nearly dark. I passed in front of an old friend's house not too far up the street. This friend of mine was an unusual one, maybe one of the more mature of my friendships at this age (11 to 13). It seemed purer to me than other friendships that I had at the time, perhaps because we had no practical reason to be friends. We weren't in basketball or soccer together, we didn't go to camp together, etc. We simply made for good company.

As I was walking in front of his house last night, I thought of a time when we had hiked together through some of the same old trees and brush that I had seen on the trail. We weren't following a particular path though, and we snapped and discarded any branches that impeded our passage. Eventually, we came to a cliff's ledge that was too steep, making it impossible for us to continue. Rather than viewing the long drop as a possibility for instant death, my friend and I attempted to slide down the hill skidding to a stop as close as we could to the edge without falling off, often halting with various appendages dangling over the side of the sharp decline.

Now this is where it gets kind of interesting. I know that one of us slid to the edge that day and was not able to hang on. One of us fell 25 feet or so and hit, hard, on the next small dirt ledge. But I can't tell you which one. And in fact, I don't believe that it matters which one of us actually fell off the edge. The event was recorded so furiously in my mind that I seem to have both perspectives seared into my recollection. On the one hand, I can see myself staring up at my friend wondering how I am still alive after such a spill. And then it's also as if I remember being the one who was looking down at my friend, wondering if he was hurt, wondering if I was going to have to drag him home, or if I would have to run for help. What was I going to tell his mom?

Now I know that it's not physically possible to occupy two points in space simultaneously, but my perception of the fall was some how recorded from both sides. The outcome and implications of the hurt or possible injuries that might have resulted meant the same to me either way. It was just weird; I was unable to divide our dichotomized perception of reality.

Here's what I was thinking as I walked the rest of the block past my friends house: perhaps the reason I'm always a little melancholy is because there is always something to mourn even if things look dandy from where I stand; and at the same time, I'm always hopeful that the smiles and laughs that resonate in the collective body of believers will cause us to rejoice with one another. I'm beginning to look a little harder into the eyes of the people I hug and kiss these days. They look familiar.