Mark Phillips' Pages: Workbook: 8/21/03: It's only after twenty years, and fourteen years of distance, that I'm able to see what my friends saw at the time.

Steven Marc, "Chicago" (1983) — Steven Marc, *(Chicago) United States from the "Black Trans-Atlantic Experience Project"* (1983)

August 21, 2003:

It's only after twenty years, and fourteen years of distance, that I'm able to see what my friends saw at the time. The manipulativeness, the petty mean-spiritedness.

This is not to imply lack of sympathy, or to suggest that I feel I was some sort of angel myself. Rather that understanding doesn't come with experience, but from the distance one achieves when one leaves an experience behind, willingly or not.