This City, Meet Me Now

I'm glad they tore this city up.  Road by road as I left ten years ago.  Granted it wasn't the whole city - the city is too fine and historical to embark on such a crass overhaul - but at least certain main arteries are gone, and buried in tunnels, with new clean grass over them, and brand new views of the harbor that never existed, or at least never existed except for drivers passing them by at 65 miles per hour.

I'm glad they tore it up.  I hate this city. Hate is a strong word, but I drove into one of its college corner neighborhoods today, the one I used to live in as a college kid.  The one I used to walk in with my college beau, feeling more alone than I ever felt as a single woman after that.  I drove into this section of personal ruin in town, to unearth a document that also represented shame and hurt: a small claims court docket from the year 1997, showing that I had I had defaulted and owed a car rental company $1587.  How does that happen?  How?  I'll tell you.   It happens when your former self is a fractured version of you.  A waif, spiritually.  And therefore somehow stunted in reality.  Any thinner, spiritually, and I would have blown into ash.  And this waif was the girl walking beside a boy, through the city's college corridors, empty and gashed.

I wanted to apologize to her, today.  While I drove on the gorgeous sunny morning in the depth of winter, as a full person, healed and whole and complete with a hearth and a partner.  I cried the whole way.  Feeling her watching me, feeling her wondering how to get there, how to get there.  I remembered her walking one corner with her beau, and running to meet him another time, running late. I remembered him stroking her thigh in a warm bedroom.  All the time, her heart was throbbing and she didn't even know it.  Just knew she felt alone.   I never talked to my friends back then, not about the contorted ball of hurt that I didn't understand, couldn't articulate.  I just lived, in excruciating youth.  It wasn't all bad, of course, not at all.  There are great memories with friends and even with the beau. 

But today, all I remembered was the aloneness.  I remembered my car breaking down on one scenic drive in the city - I was all alone, aptly, when the clutch snapped in half.  I rolled the car off the 40 mph speedway into a town hall driveway, and went in to borrow a phone.  I remembered another car of mine, same period, same city - breaking down as I drove it to the repair shop. The ball bearing was coming apart.  My wheel was thumping and banging, and I could smell burning metal.  I lost the power to steer much at all, and barely made it, smoking and clunking into the drive of the small, potentially sketchy mechanic I had called.  Alone. 

My, I was heroic. Some days I felt that way.  This makes me sad today too.  Like I used the heroism as a high to hide the void inside me.  I let no one in. No one.  Not really. 

So forgive me, if I decry this beautiful city.  I left it for a reason.  Never thought I would come back.  But I did, for a new love.  In a new chapter, in a new time.  When I had broadened my heart, opened it wide, let it out, and let people in.  I came back to live just outside the city, in a place that is new to me and full of associations of my love, my partner, my husband.  Driving back into the throngs of the past today, I wondered if I could ever replace those familiar sites with this full feeling.  But I really don't think so.  The cry of those old feelings was so strong. Because they were never released, they just melded, through my eyesight, onto the sidewalks, onto the brick buildings and crosswalks, the skyline, the naked shivering winterlight trees.  It was their only outlet.  Indelible.

It's 2003 All Over Again

There you are one day: buying law books from a 24-year old outside a pizza shop.  She turns the corner with 8 heavy softcover bar review books, half of which are in her boyfriend's arms (both of them look about seventeen).  No worries though, because  you've brought your guy too.  The guy you married in June. Six feet two, and full of more love than you ever imagined would come in a partnership.  You've been in that place - that sweet home, sweet life - for two years.  But before that...

Maybe you spent your first 34 years of life on a rather solitary bent, with a twist of workaholism.  Maybe you went back to school around 26, got a law degree, practiced litigation for four years, drove home after 9 pm pretty much daily from work. 

And now, the balancing trick.  Arms out on a tightrope.  The pull of the past on one side, the pull of the very different present, on the other.  And you'll take that bar exam, because that's where you live now.  This state, his state, is now your state.  Well, who are we kidding - it was kind of your state before, too.  You went to undergrad here, and worked here for five years after that. You have old friends here who were happy you moved BACK.  So, it's your state, too.  The state where, in 2008, when the economy burst, was difficult to find work in-house, which is the kind that doesn't necessarily require the bar of the state you're living in.

How would you feel?  Taking the bar exam after months and months of unemployment.  Indeed after two years of working contract jobs which were much less stressful and intellectually rigorous than the law firm work you had done previously. How would you feel taking on this challenge? 

Well... I, personally, would feel a tiny bit afraid.  A bit excited.  A bit confused and concerned about becoming who I was - too focused on work - and the strain that could put on a fledgling marriage. But that's just me.