Sometimes you have to look into your past to understand how to go forward. I’ve been to two hometowns now and they both told me to move on. The past is a liminal space. It’s real and unreal, comfortable and awkward, familiar and alien. I’ve heard many times that nostalgia is an ache, but I understood it properly this time. When I stepped out onto the platform of Newark Airport station and took the train in the wrong direction, to New York. And I thought about the train going the other way, taking all the stops, Secaucus, Elizabeth, Linden, Rahway, New Brunswick, Princeton Junction.
I’m not sure the past is so seductive. How is it that even when I was longing to leave West Windsor when I was 16, I look back at 26 and see the sun drenched summers, the coolness of the pool and its iridescence as I exhaled my way down to watch the light drip through the oxygen bubbling back up to meet the sky? Two teenagers fooling around in the woods behind the library, a boy in a suit holding a bundle of flowers with all our friends giggling in the backyard, the waft of wisteria in a little pink room, the golden sheen that hit the curtains in the evenings, the sound of crickets, a cornfield, a swingset, cul de sacs, mailboxes with the flags up, open spans of grass we stood at the edge of, thinking we’d live forever?
I look at the boy now and he’s a man. The boyfriend in the woods is now a terse ex who likes rock climbing, the sight of a pool spins my breath into a series of puffs that lurch up the side of a ferris wheel, small towns make me nervous, the high rises around Avalon Cove make the bricks look duller, the World Trade Centres aren’t there anymore, it’s all strange. My feet know the way to the threshold of an old home but can’t step inside. I thought pure intuition would help, that I would just know where things were, but I didn’t. My body doesn’t know anymore.
Here, I feel uprooted. The metro takes contactless now. The exhibit of Impressionist art in the Guggenheim has almost stayed the same. I went to say hello to the boys. Van Gogh, Degas, Gaugin, their faces were all still there, but the placards had changed, with words like ‘colonial’ and ‘awareness’ neatly lettered on the walls. It’s funny, somehow.
There were some new places, too. A graveyard, where I had to remind myself that people are never really gone, that the people I love are right here, that my feet carry the memories of all the roads I’ve walked down, that every street light and train ride and shopkeeper are in my front pocket. That if I close my eyes, my body on the ground, the ceiling keeping watch above me, I can feel them pulsing in my wrist, my my temple, my neck. God is closer to you than your jugular vein.