June was a ghostly month for me. I spent a lot of time going back to palimpsestic places – places where experiences and emotions accumulated in ways that feel tangible to me decades later, every time I go back.
None of these experiences really mean anything, exactly. I’d forgotten about many of them until a family member or friend or object reminded me. They just have me thinking and feeling my way through what it means to exist in time, sensing the textures or afterimages of the past now. I don’t have anything particularly interesting to say about memory or distance – just small musings, photo caption sized, on my idiosyncratic experiences with feeling the past in the present. (If I’m doing anything in this post, I suppose it’s trying to write my way into a coherent reflection on thoughts I keep having about interfacing with the world through this body I live in. Idiosyncrasy: etymon Hellenistic Greek ἰδιοσυγκρασία, peculiar temperament or habit of body.)
West Branch, Iowa, where I played basketball, set a conference record in track, attended some kind of Raggedy Ann convention (?) with my best friend, felt alienated, ate ice cream, reconnected with family, felt nostalgia for pasts I didn’t experience…
Somewhere off I-80, an exit I took often after transferring to a new school. I took this photo during a trip home after I moved away because I thought it captured the gorgeousness and the sadness of places like the place I’m from.
I don’t even know where to start with Boston, the bike path along the Charles…
…the Somerville apartments and porches and bars, all the places where my twenties happened, where I rearranged myself and was rearranged.
Going back to Princeton is like prodding a bruise. It’s deeply painful and I can’t seem to stop doing it. Walking through this town feels like swimming in a sea of trauma and love and excitement and disappointment and depression and exhilaration and self-hatred and triumph and shame and discovery. It’s a horrible place and I’m sure I’ll be back.
Penn Station is a weird comforting minefield to me (yes I know that doesn’t make any sense). The fact that tasti D.lite still exists is as soothing as it is baffling.
Estes Park then…
… and Estes Park now. I had the rare experience of recovering a small forgotten memory here: watching hummingbirds at a cabin we rented when I was a child. I also got to have my breath taken away by the view at the end of a hike. My childhood and adolescence were punctuated by moments like that – actually gasping out loud at the beauty of the natural world. I didn’t realize how disconnected I’d become from those experiences or how much I missed them.
Nostalgia is a trap that I’m particularly susceptible to, and I like to try to guard against it. But going back to these places now, feeling the old feelings layered underneath new ones, felt more like a springboard than a snare. I don’t know if I’m capable of anything like re-enchantment after the disillusionments of living in the world for any length of time, but this trip was at least an experience of reconnection and renewed appreciation for me. I am grateful to be in this body, in this world, with the people who are my people, whether I chose them or not. I’m grateful I feel sensations and emotions as strongly as I do. I’m grateful to be able to appreciate how mixed up painful and joyful experiences and sensations and emotions are and have to be.
I haven’t felt like I’ve had much space this year to dream, or to experience joy, or even to feel much gratitude, in spite of everything I’m lucky to have. The hostility of our species just keeps getting foregrounded in a way that’s shut down parts of me. Reencountering old emotional fields like these helped to wake them up a little.
If June was about feeling the presence of the past now, July promises to be an exercise in projecting the past into the future. I’m looking forward to making it new.
