Tag: past

Passing Time

I drive through my hometown and back like an echo. I pass storefronts and roads and churches in an afternoon that I’ve experienced more times than I can count. It’s the same glow over the bridge and the river, but for all that’s the same, nothing is the same. The McDonald’s on the corner is right where I remember, but it’s not the same McDonald’s where I tripped and dropped my double cheeseburger. The movie theater has the same name, but it’s painted white, and there’s a line of kids looking younger than I ever did. The old strip is there, but a jiujutsu dojo is open, and six more pizza restaurants glow on the street with signs I don’t recognize. Everything is just a bit off. A little different. But the bones are there. Old and tired, just like me.

I guess this is what happens when you get older.

It’s a feeling of time. When the street has more cracks than I remember. Tree roots gnarl and twist over a sidewalk that I once rollerbladed down. The world is folding and changing, along with the wrinkles on the backs of my hands. Like imprints in the snow fading over time, what I once saw and experienced becomes buried beneath the new. The fresh. The not what I remember.

We all exist in a brief moment. Watching through a narrow window that slides across the string of events we call our lives, able to see just enough forward and then watch as our trail disappears behind us. What was once the future becomes the present, and then the past. Soon enough, the past vanishes. Invisible, just like the future you can’t see.

We ritualize this, the memories that grow fuzzy as the years stamp on. At the dinner table surrounded by friends and family, we rehash the same story about how some aunt or uncle took the wrong turn on vacation or how a cousin broke their arm riding their bike. They are memories of color, smell, and sound. Memories of places that, if you were to travel to them, would have different colors, different smells, and different sounds. The world is spinning, and all we can do is view it through the lens of a memory we have no control over.

We all have thousands of memories lost. Millions of instants pass through our vision, filtered through our brain, and then deleted from existence. You don’t remember the time you dropped your chicken nugget on the street, but remember the squirrel eating corn in the front yard. You remember the feeling of watching the one you loved in high school walking to class with someone else, but you don’t remember what clothes you were wearing.

The point I’m making isn’t very relevant. It’s something obvious and natural. Time exists, or at least, the passing of events exists. We are just along for the ride.

The December Stadium

Snow dusted the frozen dirt of the empty stadium, falling in flurries that twisted with the December wind. My fire wasn’t enough to keep me warm, but it was something—providing just a single point of heat on the metal bleachers. I wasn’t alone. Six others sat around similar fires on the scuffed turf. No one went high in the seats after the fire a few weeks back, and another inferno was inevitable. I stared into my hissing flame and tightened my grip around that near-empty bottle I had stuffed in a damp paper bag. I sat on a ripped cushion I found on the street and watched my breath puff from my mouth. The stadium provided little shelter from the wind, but it beat the streets, and it wasn’t very crowded inside the husk of a stadium.

When I was ten, my father took me here, back when he could hide his drinking problem and before I learned that he had passed that same problem on to me. We couldn’t afford tickets, so he brought me to some rooftops where a crowd had gathered to watch the game. Those houses are gone now, replaced with a Sunoco gas station and a McDonald’s. There’s nothing to see here anymore. Just dirt, snow, and a handful of folks stuck in place.

I closed my eyes and listened to my fire and the hacking coughs of someone below the bleachers. I pretended the wind was the roar of a crowd, and the distant smell of fast food was fresh ballpark hotdogs, but my imagination couldn’t hold. A police siren broke my concentration, and I was back on the icy metal seats with the others just as alone as I was, squatting in the snow.