Foregone moments, present memories, forever buildings

Visiting your childhood neighborhood. Driving by your elementary school. Returning to your hometown after quite a long while. Walking back into your dorm, excited to reunite with your friends. Visiting campus after graduation. A distant warmth surrounds you, and yet, an innate coldness emerges from within. 

Regardless of your age or particular experience, I would like to believe that you hold some place to be important. Perhaps it is your grandparents’ home, where you grew up in their warm embrace and learned to be who you are now. Maybe it is the scrawny path you once took into the fated park where you would receive your first kiss. Or it may be that there is no complex reason, you simply hold dear that nearby street crossing, with the smell of food stands and the roar of the crowds marching by. There is something unique — something sacred — about that place that will forever remain. It is as if when we interact with it we leave a part of ourselves there, deep within the folds of these spaces. We carve our very own home in the fabric of space-time to claim as our own and bury within, lovingly enveloped in the warmth of static memory. We may not realize it, but we have made the space ours, for eternity.

Or so, we would like to believe. Is that really the case? Can anything ever truly remain in stasis? 

For better or worse, everything changes. Always, always everything does. Yet, some things change much faster than others. 

As you return to your dorm, as you recount your summer misadventures with your friends, there is a hurt unlike any other lurking behind your words that could never be properly expressed. You are certainly most glad to rejoin your dear friends, but there are evident gaps, as a handful have now graduated. And so, the realization alas cements: they will never again reside in these same halls as you. Your paths may cross again in the future, most certainly, but it will simply never be the same. The dorm will not be the same without them. 

Never, never is anything the same.

And yet the dorm remains. The building still stands, as it always has. 

Would you say that is the same dorm?

You may pass by your elementary school, even walk the halls you raced and laughed through at a much younger age, but your teachers have long since departed, your classmates moved, the curriculum updated, the menu changed, the smells replaced, the memories overwritten. And yet, and yet, the school remains; the building still stands, as it did before, its layout untouched. But to attempt to consider it the same school is somewhat repulsive of a thought. This place of yours is not truly yours, is it? Not anymore. 

It is as if that place of yours is dead. Your reunion is tainted, for you are not truly reuniting at all, you are merely visiting that place’s grave.

There is an innate clash that occurs when we visit places that are no longer ours. There are two overlapping realities, but neither seem to quite capture reality: the vivid past and the lifeless present. We stand in the coalescence of these — in the crux of space and time — and we are swallowed by the collision in our hearts.

Our relationship with places that die is not merely one that can be explained away by some vague sense of nostalgia or recognition that we age, that time passes and that things change. No, it is something much more intimate. There is something smear, nay painful, about enveloping oneself in the empty, cold embrace of a space that no longer is yours to claim, your relationship ruptured beyond redemption by the passage of time. You stand in the absolute perfect spatial coordinates, you are where it once was.

However, regarding your position in time, you are perpetually floating away from that ancient memory. You may physically take a step forward or backward, you may exit the building or lay within, you may hide in every crevice or even shatter the entirety of it, but naught stops time as it proceeds, indifferent to your hurt.

You are here, and yet, you are not here at all.

Cursed we are with the power to move in space but frozen, shackled by time. For some, this is a comforting recognition; for others, a maddening one; and for the rest, it may perhaps be rather tragic. Above all else, there is an ache that accompanies that feeling of craving for that which no longer exists. The building remains as merely a husk, a reminder of your place’s death.

We are watching our small home in space-time, our childish rebellion against the unwavering pace of the universe, fade away.

Yet, once again, the produced feeling cannot be merely reduced to sadness. Because, in truth, there is joy in revisiting something that is gone. After all, do we not visit graveyards? To say we enjoy standing there, drenched in rain, facing a loved one’s gravestone is not an appropriate description, but sadness does not capture the feeling either. There is something respectful — something sacred — about the act. We can replay the moments we shared together in our minds, we can laugh at the thought of their most ludicrous jests and we, too, can cry, mourning the love we never got to give. 

They may not be here, but their memory remains. And what a beautiful memory that is.

Maybe, just maybe, that is forever.

And thus, defiant we remain. We are here, after all, carrying that special place of ours in our memories.