I still feel strange and disoriented from this past weekend. It doesn’t help that on Saturday it was 80 degrees and sunny where I was, and now there’s snow on the ground. Oh, and we’ve had a time change. I don’t know what year it is, what month it is, what hour it is.

I feel like my entire life since the summer of 1999 has been fake. Like all the people I’ve met have been mere figments of my imagination. I’m all confused. Everything at UVA just feels like it was more real, as I’ve said.

Vacations can screw you up. Or change you, at least.

In March 1998, during spring break of my second year of law school, I went on a weeklong tour of the South with the Glee Club. It was during that week that I fell hard for a guy for the first time in years, and I realized, at last, that I wanted to be gay again. I was 24. I hadn’t felt like this since before I’d gone back in the closet at 19.

When I returned to law school, I felt all out of alignment — dislodged, like I’d gone over a big pothole. A puzzle piece warped by the sun, unable to fit back into my proper position. I couldn’t sit still, and I couldn’t participate in my law school identity anymore — I could only hover over it, observe it; my inner motor was racing too fast, faster than the speed of life. I bought Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room is Empty and devoured it. I was feverish.

The events of that spring break set off a whole chain of events that led to my being an uncloseted, sexually active gay man.

I feel a bit like that warped puzzle piece again. Things don’t feel quite the same as they did before the weekend. I worry that as the days pass, it will all fade away, and I’ll forget everything I learned, become complacent again, once more let my dissatisfaction whisper around me so softly and diffusely and not-immediately-painlessly that I accept it as part of The Way Things Are and forget that it’s fixable.

It’s like in “Afterlife,” in which Buffy has just returned from the dead and is faced by an incorporeal demon that she can’t fight until her friends magically give it solid form. (“Buffy” is always minable for psychological allegories.)

I want these thoughts and feelings to remain in solid form. I want to remain concretely dissatisfied with the current state of my life. I want to remember that things don’t have to be this way. I want to remember how this weekend felt. I want to remember who I used to be. I want to remember what I need to do.