Old Ground

There were nights that winter when I would walk through Boston and the quiet would leave me gasping. It was almost two years ago now, though it feels like a story from another century, set in some dark city I’ve never stepped in. Places are strange like that-sometimes it’s like they’re breathing and weeping and remembering with you. You walk down a familiar street and you feel the past coursing through you; your bones shake with old desires and buried dreams. Then sometimes it disappears. The street is just a street, and you can only feel its weight in its absence. When I think of my first months in this city, I don’t see myself in the memories. I see someone distant and desperate and restlessly young. I see someone who latched onto the first friends who seemed kind. Someone who latched onto the first thing shaped like love. As hard as I try, I can’t seem to fill the chasm between that someone and who I am now. A version of me is stranded in that hazy, tender year, still wandering the Public Garden and watching the lights flicker across the Charles River. When I roam these places today, I feel a visceral separation from the past and its narrow halls. The sights that once plagued me have been paved over with fresh memories-ones made with truly wonderful people who I adore more than I thought possible. Yet, though I’m far removed from that time, I can’t help but picture the lives that almost were. Some days I’m stuck inside them, and I spend hours tracing those paths until they trail off. It kills me when I think about it too long. How there are people that I once would’ve devoted all my years to, whose names now I don’t dare say aloud. How, no matter where I go, who I meet, and what I find, there are corners of happiness I will never know. When you deeply and honestly cherish a friend or lover, their stories-and, in essence, their whole lives-become an extension of yours. When you lose that connection, you’re suddenly cut off from not only this singular life, but from the lives of everyone in their orbit, from every branch of their tree. It’s terribly cruel, because you’ll never know that specific love again, but you’ll also never know their neighbor Paul or their Aunt Kathy. And you would’ve liked to know Aunt Kathy. Change is a magnificent force, terrifying and cleansing. It’s the paradoxical constant of our lives, a shadow hanging on the walls of each passing moment. On the warmest and gentlest of nights, change lingers like a pestering mosquito, accosting the mind with the same tired refrain that this must eventually end. And there is no pause, no way to sit still. You can sit for as long as you’d like, but the rest of the world will keep rushing onward. One day it’s all here and the next it was many years ago, and you don’t know anyone you knew then-not even you. It’s tempting to leap into the tar pits of yesterday. To sit in a crowded room and only see its ghosts. I know I’ve spent many heartsick afternoons gazing at the trees in Boston Common, recalling how sunlight fell softly upon them in a season long gone. I spent a whole bitter winter reliving an unreachable autumn; it was the only place I could find my old friends. But if I had stayed there, the winter would have stretched for a lifetime, and I would’ve never known how beautiful this city can be, how beautiful this world can be. Some would have you believe that the cure for misery is simply moving on. As if the past was ever such an easy opponent. The reality is that no one moves on from anyone, or anywhere. We absorb them and move with them. Most of the people I’ve known still live with me. I hear their favorite songs blasting through the thin walls, smell their scent from just around the corner. Many are neighbors now, and on certain nights I’ll catch a glimpse of them in their kitchens or living rooms through a cracked window. A few are like old relatives who only visit on the rarest of occasions. But when they do, they come up and kiss my cheek and hold me close and say look how you’ve grown, oh look how you’ve grown.
https://berkeleybeacon.com/old-ground/

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