One year from now...

One year from now will I have changed as much as I have changed over the past year? I read my notes and journals, letters to close friends and confidants from last year and I hear a voice that I remember, vaguely, like a lingering echo. Is it that I have changed, or is it more likely that I cannot remember who I was a year ago, as if my life started fresh every day, always from the same starting point, but never the same ending point.

Like the protagonist played by Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day, I wake once a year each year, restarting my life from that one instant. And the year is different every time, because of the echo, the faint memory of what happened last year, making this year's thoughts and choices just enough different so that the year follows a new path. At the end of the year I sleep, and the memories fade.

One year from now will I have changed? I would think so. How much? In what way? I cannot guess. Perhaps if I write down who I am today, so that I can read it a year from now. But didn't I do that last year? Wasn't it just about a year ago that I wrote about who I would be one year later? I have a distant memory, foggy, blurred, incomplete and beyond reach. Wasn't it a writing prompt about one year from now?

By James Seamarsh, I think, if I remember correctly...