As part of the New and Improved Lifestyle I’ve tried to establish over the past year, I’ve been taking afternoon walks every day, workflow permitting. Most days I seem to end up wandering through the Avenues, one of Salt Lake’s oldest residential neighborhoods, which is little more than stone’s-throw from my office. It’s a lovely place for a stroll, with lots of big trees and an eclectic mix of housing styles: turreted Victorians, cozy bungalows, mid-century ramblers, even a few art-deco apartment buildings.

I was up there earlier today, in fact, walking through a steady rain with one hand jammed deep into my pocket and the other growing cold on my umbrella handle. I could smell the faint but distinctive odor given off by my leather jacket when it gets wet, and water was seeping through cracks in the soles of my worn-out sneakers. A pretty young thing on a bicycle smiled at me as she rolled past, a tiny diamond stud winking from the side of her nose while raindrops glittered in the thick, flat braid of chestnut hair that ran down the center of her back.

My iPod chose that moment to summon an Allman Brothers tune, one that sounds cheerful on the surface but always evokes an unaccountable bittersweet feeling in me, and it occurred to me that if I kept walking in this direction long enough, I’d end up on the campus of my alma mater, the University of Utah. And suddenly my head filled with half-remembered emotions and half-forgotten ambitions, the flavor of a time in my life 25 years past. I found myself thinking of other springtime rainstorms, of a girl who meant everything to me until the day she didn’t, of stories I’ve never written and places I haven’t gotten around to visiting.

Then I had the weirdest sensation that my younger self was nearby, not just metaphorically but in close physical proximity, as if he was walking along this same sidewalk, beneath these same trees, smelling and sensing all the things I was, but separated from me by some kind of membrane. Something permeable enough to detect a presence on the other side, but unbreakable. A time barrier, I suppose, if we want to get all Doctor Who-ish. I could feel his restlessness, his idealism, his curiosity about the world and his naive certainty that he’d someday get everything he wanted, just because he was him. I wondered if somehow he could feel me too, and what, specifically, of me he felt. My disappointments and regrets? My banal middle-aged anxieties about health and money and getting old too soon? Would he even recognize me as the person he was to become, or would I just seem like a stranger to him?

To be honest, sometimes, when I’m walking in the rain, I seem like a stranger to myself…