Flashback

It starts with a feeling, an emotion. You are intrigued or captured by it, and then you start scrolling through your mind for its origins. It happens very often but is there a pattern to these flashbacks?

There I was, confined to my room by the new lockdown regulations, when a wave of nostalgia, with a hint of melancholy, swept over me. The days have become quite short here in the U.K. and I often feel the mental strain when it’s 4:30 p.m. and the sun has already dropped below the horizon. This flashback took me to a day that now seems ages ago, a day on which I felt the same. I used to commute to work back then and I remember leaving work at 3:30 p.m. which was an hour earlier than usual, enough for me to ride my motorbike home during daylight.

There was rain on the horizon and the remaining sunlight was enough to carve a beautiful double rainbow in the sky. the sight was so emotionally captivating that I had to stop and take a picture. So I dismounted from my bike and stood there for a while, staring at something other than darkness for a change.

It’s been hard to forget that moment of discontinuity in my routine, especially during these January days that are so short with such long nights. But why today? Why was this event so vivid today?

Later while scrolling through my Facebook feed, I found that there was a notification about Memories, and there was the photo from four years ago today, with the bike off the road, and the last rays of sunlight beaming through the cloudy patch of sky, creating a fleeting double rainbow.

Isn’t it strange how sometimes we have a feeling much like a deja-vu but not necessarily visually related? It’s more like a “deja-felt”… and given that it was the same date that I was feeling this, but four years after the event, is even stranger.