Never Seen.

The next time you are walking down a familiar suburban sidewalk right as the sunset is fading, stop. Stop dead in your tracks.

Don’t worry about seeming silly. Don’t watch for supercilious stares. Stand still. Not at an intersection, nor at a mailbox, nor at a lamppost. Stop in the middle of a step that you are expected to finish. Stop, and if you blink your eyes and still know where you are, stop that, too. 

     Just stop.

     Stop and imagine that you have been dropped from the sky to where you stand. 

Stop, and tell me when the air starts to get familiar. I am curious. Does it take months to get to know, does it take in it to grow?

I will return to childhood bedrooms that seem as foreign as they once flowed, brick like bones and painted veins that once signified home, so let me ask you, what’s the difference between the first time you laid eyes on that birthday gift, what’s the difference between old wrinkled lips and fresh ones pursed to kiss, what’s the difference between the stoplight you pass every day to work and one you’ve never seen or heard, 

     or felt. Cold, stagnant, scintillating. 

See, I am midthought and midstep ambling past State Street as usual and I walk into a thick wall near an alley. At first I wonder, is this okay? That’s what our social conceptions have done to our freedoms: convert them into anxieties, is this okay? I allow myself an exasperated sigh and glance around, and then, I stop minding them, freeze, and take a look around. 

     The next time you are reducing everything in your life to the past, stop. 

I tell myself that I have never walked past this place before. The building across the street, the power lines and the slope, the trees across the way and the parking lot stretch, I have never experienced this town before. The buildings refuse me and I let them, diaphanous things they’ve become, I stop looking at them as if I know them by name, convinced that they are generic facades on a typical small-town street. It works. This scene, this could be from anywhere, any picture, any movie. My memories of this place might set it apart, but what good is the familiarity if it makes me skim over? Is it not indolent for me to stop seeing, to stop noticing? To look at things and see the past but not the present? 

We think that it would enervate our world-weary minds to treat old things as new, but this is a lie. It enervates us to stop seeing and to stop wondering, to stop learning like uprooted hearts still beating with bewilderment. 

So, I let it feel new. The bricks and arches, the spaces in between, the crosswalk and the lawn extending left of me. It feels so new that I am hopeful I might break out of my bridle with teeth snarling, hooves stamping, and mind reared. It feels so new that I am afraid I am lost completely; that if you dropped me here in a dream I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or gain my bearings, wouldn’t be able to find my way home. 

I hate that memory is a blessing and a curse like this; if it was one or the other, I’d have my answers. Instead I stand in the dimming summer air, simmering thin, wondering if I have been spending my entire life trying to be someone else without intending it. Taking after someone else’s clothes, someone else’s lines, someone else’s style, someone else’s home. I don’t want that. I’m standing here in the middle of the sidewalk and cars are passing and people are walking off in all directions and I’m looking at the cement in front of me like I’ve never seen it before, and all of a sudden this is when I feel more independent than I have felt all my life.

     It is a short moment. I am unhooked. I am original. I am vast. 

     So it follows that in all the other moments, I must be a slave. 

As far as the fear of the unknown goes, while I’m pausing on that sidewalk afraid of getting lost, I can still raise my head to the sky and inhale as deeply as I want. I do not need landmarks or welcome mats. I want novel lights in bygone dawns, and only your billets-doux to anchor me down. Olfaction, see, is the greatest trigger of memory; and for me, it’s all the ones that I want to keep, and so if I’m dropped like a needle on a record I can’t recognize, I will trace the air for the scent of your skin. And besides, this is what new experience is about, after all—to change yourself and go back to the start so that you can find, there, everything you want. 

Blink.

Sometimes I blink and when I open my eyes again, I see my thoughts through a detached lens as they pass through my head, and I realize that above all else, I am waiting. That is my natural state, a state of enduring the present while craving the future. I circle in a holding pattern, assuming subconsciously that one day a stranger will press a key that unlocks everything into my palm.

Sorry.

How am I supposed to function when my muddied but loving boots are not making imprints on anyone’s souls? I keep stomping around, bound to the loudness I hope someone will hear. Hear to say, “Stop. Come inside, I will make a cup of tea.” I am not meant for hostels and half-romances. I am meant for trips around the world and lengthy novels written solely about the beauty and fear behind your hands. Hands I only wish I could find. Mine keep searching for you behind blackened keys and dried-up pens, but I only feel heat running thin. I try to look back, but there are these spots in my mind. What was his laugh like? Did he really mean to speak those words? They are dissolving from my grasp; water pouring out between my paled fingers. I have not much left, Lord. 
Why was I given the need to love so greatly when all it has done has broken off what’s left of my fractured body? Why is it there when all it has done is make people run? What good is it? Damnit, I sit here crying because I lack the strength to dare to leave this place without another glance yet too weak to be on my own. The one that let me feel safe. My prince who brought about passion. And the only person that ever cared to understand the real me. What good is it ripping my heart out from my chest and handing it over just to get it right back? They are probably all debating whether to put their ‘wasted times’ returns back onto their debits or visas. “Sign your name here,” I will point, “and you will get a full refund. Terribly sorry about the troubles.” I am so terribly sorry.