When I was fourteen or so I saw a perfume ad that said something to the effect of: Memory is your image of perfection.   I remember that I repeated that phrase whenever I could thinking it made me sound very grown up.  Memory to me was everything, and it took a huge chunk of my early twenties to move beyond my past and begin to live in the present.  I had to realize that the best times of my life we not already lived but they could still lay ahead.

I was all about living in the future in my late twenties, early thirties.  I was all about having the biggest baddest job that would make me the richest farther down the road.  I was always living in the next day, the next plan, the next step to get me further along the “plan.”

When I became sick I lived in the present – trust me on this.  No amount of medications will actually allow the pain to go away long enough to float back in time and feel like you did before.  It’s simply impossible.

So that’s where I’ve lived…where do I prefer?  It’s difficult for me to say as those glass-like surfaces of my memory make it look so pristine and shiny beautiful.  It’s harder now to determine where the past stopped being my present and the future stopped being my life.  I can hardly remember when I first saw the flowers bloom, let alone the last time I watched them wilt.  All I know for sure is that they are open now.

This is Sage, 31 and currently living in the present (I think,) in Iowa, USA.