Drifting Backwards...

Goddamn I hate this hotel room.

I cannot wait to get out of here.  Tomorrow, I'll love ya...

I just had to get out, for at least a little while.  Decided to just go for a drift.  Left with a bottle of water, some good walking shoes, and a strong desire to get lost.  At every crossroads turning down the path of least familiarity.

End up in a maze of an old residential neighborhood I've never been in before.  (It still amazes me just how many parts of this town I've spent almost my entire life in that I've never seen before.)  Winding capillaries of pre-fab, post-War homes.  It was an old neighborhood, in every sense - I lost count of the number of "No Smoking - No Open Flame - Oxygen In Use" signs I saw taped to front doors.

Winding my way this way and that through a fucking beautiful spring afternoon, I turned a corner... and there was my old high school, from an angle I had never seen it before in my entire life.  I had no idea where I was just then, but suddenly I also knew exactly where I was.  Cognitive dissonance.  Gnosis.

How could I not wander those grounds again?  I made my way towards the campus.  Passed the old apartment building across the street where my first love had rented a small basement apartment with a friend of ours when she'd moved out of her parents house after graduation.  Where she'd gotten pregnant with his child.  Where she'd lied to me that it was mine.  I can never see that building without smelling the pennyroyal tea she had used to abort it.  A sick, metallic, moldy smell, it had permeated every surface in that small apartment and hung in the air for months.  It made the air taste like pain and fear and sadness.

I kept going, and walked around the campus of my old high school, taking in all the sights - noting all the things that had changed, and all the things that were still the same.  I saw the giant old oak in front of the school, where we'd use to sit on days like this and eat our lunch.  I slid down the bannister outside the front door - one more time, just for old times's sake.  I wasn't quite as graceful as I remember being back then.  And it gave me a wedgie.

I made my way around to the back of the school, to the parking lot and main entrance.  (I always thought it was funny that the main entrance was around back.)  I saw the brick tool shed for the apartment building across the street, behind which we used to hide to smoke between classes.  It was under a tree on the lawn of that apartment building, across the street from that school one spring break so, so long ago that She and I fell in love.  Though it would take us another decade to realize it.

I sat down for a rest under that tree.  And I just took it all in.  The weight of all that nostalgia like a lover on top of me - heavy, but pleasant; on the edge of smothering, but in a good way.  I felt back to all those years ago.  I remembered the children we'd been then, so awkwardly confident, so brazenly strange.  Even then, we knew that moment was special.  That we'd never have another like it for the rest of our lives.  It might've been the one thing we'd been right about.

We never could've imagined what would come for us.  That we would ever become so important to each other.  That we would ever wrap our lives around one another.  That we could ever possibly become fat, old drunks.

I realized I was crying.  For the children we'd been.  For all we've lost.  I sat there under that magickal tree in the glow of the evening sun, and I grieved for every missed opportunity, for everything we used to be, for every weight of the world we've decided to carry.  For all we could've done.  For all we can never do again.

I cried for the children we'd left behind.  That beautiful, strong, scared, strange little girl.  And for the boy I'd been.  And I realized, how much like him I still feel.  How I still see myself as 16, as 19, as 20, 25.  How could it be that I am this boy with a beard, sitting here under the weight of these memories that are so much larger than I have ever been?  It won't be very long at all before I'm 40.

At what point do I begin to feel like a man?