Sanjana has come unstuck in time.
Sanjana. That would be me. And staring into my bathroom mirror and suddenly finding my face caked in makeup should have incited a far more awakening response. But the blemish on my face I had acquired a few days before was now non-existent. That excitement was a bit more overpowering. I stepped out the door and set my foot on the carpeted stair, only to look down and see a spread of wooden steps floating up. I looked up and smiled. It was nice.

The sun was setting, and the brightness hurt my eyes. The colors of the sky turned from dark yellow to a flash of white, and I found my arms wrapped around the body of a face.

“Ok now pretend to laugh while I take this picture.”

“Okay.”

I closed my eyes with the flash to hear the laughter and the face echoing throughout the basement. I wiped tears from my eyes. The 2012 Olympics were on TV. It was irrelevant what we were laughing about; we were long past the joke. But no one wanted to stop. So we laughed.

The picture came out well.

I looked forward towards the crowd of familiarity. There was my cousin. And there was my sister. And there was my best friend. There was my entire world. Although it seemed strange, I realized that my world fit into one room. Not a very big world I suppose.
The lights below me flickered.
I cocked my ear to take in the new flood of music that had enveloped the hall. It was calming, the sort of music that undid the knots in my stomach. Everyone was drifting and I joined them. A uniformed cater waiter walked by as I spun. My vision was streaked and once the blur cleared I found myself at work the next week. Nothing had changed; everything was the same way it had been for the past two years. The same light blue polo. The same bright yellow walls. The same tables and the same red pens. I realized that the fact that I was here meant that at some point I had left the music. The days spent in that room began to blur my vision again and I spun back into the calm.
I reached out to grab her arm and she walked by me. Suddenly it was cold. Really cold. Icy, white flakes were everywhere. I sighed. I hated snow. And then I saw the man. It was winter of 2010.

“I can’t believe we made this snowman on our own!”

“Yeah, it’s huge.”
She stood next to the snowman; her 6-year old body barely reached its neck. The music came back to my ears and I looked down. She barely reached my neck.
And then I was hungry. I hadn’t eaten all night. I walked out to where the food was and followed the smell of sauce. Pasta sounded amazing. The scent took me back to my kitchen. The smell of pasta came from the stove as my dad made dinner. My favorite dinner and one of the only things I knew how to make on my own. As he stirred the pot I closed my eyes with the warmth of the room and opened them to a different room.
The night eventually did come to its conclusion and a parade of people streamed out. Every hug was a goodbye and suddenly I was sad. Nothing would be like this again. But as I walked out to see the spread of steps below me once again, I realized it was okay, because everything had been really nice.
And the pictures and memories were always there. And each moment of each picture linked to each memory in my mind and each face in each picture linked to a million other moments. And the web in my mind would always be there to keep everything intact. Every insignificant moment would be there, even the ones that can only precisely be defined by the following phrase: “so it goes”.