Being in New Jersey in December is bringing back memories; the cold, the darkness, the angle of the sun, the leafless trees, the brittle ground. I feel like a drug-addict trying to get clean, but once back into the ol' hood, it's hard not to revert.

What and who I am now in San Francisco is different from what and who I am now in New Jersey, which is permeated by what and who I was all those years ago. I'm not crazy or screwed up as I was and I don't hate my parents anymore, but there is a dampener over what and who I really am now, which is what and who I am now in San Francisco. That and those decisions are reality. Being here is a womb; not reality.

Exactly 20 years ago, I was a freshman in high school. We were on a trimester system, so now would have been towards the end of one trimester or the beginning of the next. Just a few months prior, I was on the X-Country team, but had to quit after "passing out" during a race in a park somewhere in the Bronx.

No one knows what really happened, but I think it was emotional strain. Also in that first trimester of high school, I had been suspended for a week for psychiatric evaluation, and a prominent gash on my forearm was healing.

I don't think I was dating a Hong Kong girl named Nancy yet, I'm pretty sure that came later, and I also don't think I had actually met Shiho Nakai yet, although I had seen her 7th or 8th grade picture in my older brother's yearbook.

10 years ago I was completing my first semester of law school in San Francisco. I was living in Oakland, CA, and was about to experience my first Bay Area rainy season. It was cloudy and rainy for three weeks straight in December. By the end of the month, I would have seen the purported "love of my life", Amina, for the last time.

And today, I got an email from Madoka, who is now in the U.S. for two months, first in L.A., then in Salt Lake City. Email communications between us have been spotty at best, but I will trust that all the heart is still there. We will try to meet up at some point, I shouldn't wonder, but it's not a sure thing now that I won't have a car.

I know I still love her, even though our communication and information between us is spotty. Maybe I love her more now after realizing our communication and information is spotty. Go fig. It's the classic push and the pull.