The view around me was all gray as the rain finally began to clear up. Having wandered outside, I was now staring off into the great inland gulf, where the clouds still extended all the way to the horizon on this spring afternoon. I was 12, and still too young to understand why my family made us come back here every year. They all told me it would never make complete sense to me — it happened three years before I was born after all. Sometimes they marveled at how I was already eight, or 10, or 12 and had only ever known a world like this. I still didn’t know what to make of that.

Soon everyone was outside, and the cheerless ritual commenced. Uncle Mike was staring at his compass. “St. Louis used to be 113 miles in that direction,” he said, pointing out to sea. “They said that this year, since the water’s been a little lower, if you go out there, the top of the arch is now partly exposed.” There was a gentle enthusiasm from the rest, and these form of remarks continued for a while. My parents, as they had done countless times before, tried to explain to me exactly where our family had lived, where the Mississippi river used to be, where Max had died.

Gradually the tone of the conversation shifted. My younger cousins and I were made to listen to the familiar stories of those of us who hadn’t made it out alive. Grandma Wanda was with us. By now she could barely remember her own name, but never ceased to recall the three grandchildren she had lost that year, and the two that had survived. Next, as always happened, my parents began to talk about the war. It seemed like they needed something to take their anger out on. I didn’t understand them much when they talked about politics, but the more riled up they got, the less complicated their words became. “It’s 15 years since this happened, and all that our government cares about is stealing from what remains of the rest of the world.” “There is not a single politician in Denver willing to stand up to the president.”

By this point I was tired, cold, depressed and wanted nothing more but to return inside and watch TV or find some other diversion. But, as always, everyone was now walking along the coastal debris, and somehow I knew it was my duty, my responsibility to follow along complacently.

It was a sight I was familiar with. I made my way through the rotting wood that covered the ground — wood that used to be part of the houses that had once stood around here. Occasionally, the fragmented skeletons of old cars poked through, which had only a marginal effect in dulling the boredom that pervaded this somber pilgrimage.

At length, we decided it was time for a break and found an appropriate place to sit down for a while. As a small relief, Aunt Karli distributed some trail mix (FEMA issued). I was content to sit alone as I ate — there wasn’t much to talk about. That was when the shoes caught my eyes.

To be sure, old shoes were a relatively common sight amongst the debris, and most pairs were in far worse shape than these two sneakers sitting some 10 feet from me. But there was something different about these shoes, something at once great and terrifying. Looking at the back of them, rising up out of the ground, I could see an austerity and grandeur to them, as if they were the shadow of some great edifice. They had been soaked, but they were still completely sturdy, as if daring to defy the forces of time. Their hard gray surfaces looked like stone — stone with various shapes and inscriptions carved into it. All at once it occurred to me—these shoes resembled the ruins of the Mayans I had studied in school. These gray towers some 10 feet from me were nothing less than ancient Mayan temple — or so I almost believed for a second.

It was on that dreary spring afternoon that I first began to understand the world that had perished before my time. It felt a little confusing; after all, I had seen countless pictures of St. Louis, New York and Los Angeles in their prime, but none of them had ever resonated with me. It was an image of ruins — of artifacts that survive the destructive powers of time but leave the civilizations that created them behind — that made me begin to understand just how much my family had lost.

Photo by Benjamin Keller / North by Northwestern.

God, I just want to jump in. Nobody would notice. I’d quietly slip myself between the scraggly weeds, scraping my bruised legs on ragged beach grasses clinging desperately to clumps of damp sand. I’d crawl on my knobby knees right down to that muddy shoreline and like a shadow in night disappear into the murky brine of the Atlantic. Waves are strong today. A late summer storm’s coming. That current would drag my silent body out to sea in 20 minutes’ time and I’d be gone forever. God, it’d be so easy…

I just don’t want to think about it. But I can’t stop thinking about it. And it’s like I come to this spot a by the docks to torture myself till I cry where the sobs are drowned out by the echoing, beastly moans of the ships struggling to muster enough energy to leave the harbor. It’s all fucked up now. I shouldn’t have taken him here. His cigarette-stained breath blowing in my ears, filling up my head and seeping down to my lungs suffocating me, the weight of his body heaving off rhythm to my own, digging my hip bones into the silt-coated ground, the bulbous beads of sweat growing on his Neanderthal-like brow — God, I feel sick. I want to soak myself in cold sea water till I’m wrinkled and clean. But all I can do is dig the chewed-up rubber of my Chucks into the dirt and bite my nails till they ache.

He’s ruined it all for me here. This spot was sacred to me. When Mom’s piece of shit boyfriend would drunkenly stumble through the house threatening to kill anyone who didn’t feel like fixing him dinner, I’d come here. When doing algebra homework or cruising the half-mile of sleepy wooden shacks and gas stations that comprise our main street wasn’t quite appealing, I’d come here. Come here with some paper and pencils and sketch out what I wish my whole world was like in thick black lines and gray veils of shading and just wait, wait it out till I could graduate and pick up and leave this town in the dust.

I’d tell him all about how I could stare at the twinkling lights of the harbor for hours, how I wanted to steal away on one of the boats and end up on the farthest shore. How I wished I was something like Mark Twain. I’d have mopped up a grimy deck or gutted and cleaned fish for a month to just see somewhere new. And he’d pass me a cigarette and smile his crooked way. Brush back my unruly strands of red hair fighting with the breeze with his coarse hand, tell me that was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. I’d laugh and shake my head till my bangs blinded my eyes, but it wasn’t funny at all. A ring of crushed carcasses of beer cans and crumb-lined snack bags made our stage for the act. For the scene to play out in painfully dragged-out slow-motion movements under a blanket of stormy night sky. My muffled voice struggling to climb up my throat and release itself into the air and scream, my nails clawing at his strong forearms, trapped in a human cage.

It started with an evening like this one, with that great divide between sea and sky, cloud and clear atmosphere, highlighting the gray abyss on either side. Tired navy eyelids revealing a surprisingly lively gaze, that stretch of dim sunlight fighting to illuminate a slice of world till it relinquishes all power to the hushed stars studding the night sky. There’ll probably be many more. I won’t see them here, though. I pray that this spot will be swallowed up by the greedy sea licking at its sandy banks. I pray I don’t do the same.

This — this art, that is at once a creation and destruction of the self, standing on the wall like a behemoth, which I made that one night that we passed by, thinking to ourselves, “Why not make art on top of the art already on this brick canvas,” as I thought to myself, “My art is better than your art” (a little admission I made silently, a gentle moment of self-aggrandizement that every painter, sculptor, poet needs every once in a while to justify the continuation-demonstration-revisitation of aesthetic creation), and outlined with my hand the outline of myself, and transformed myself into a creature formed of disciplined, concentric circles: an apt rendition of man itself, as we are all imperfect things grown from things that are perfect, seeing as imperfection is something we make of ourselves and for ourselves, for we are at once fighting perfection, drawing up for ourselves more rules to tie ourselves down to our flaws: outlaws, and outliers of the equilibrium nature provides for us through the constancy of daily routine (the sun sets, rises and moves to an invisible but calculated clock); and I have made myself into art so I will last as long as time will permit, while the red bricks lose their colors and the weeds grow tall around me, and the people who pass by change and grow old, and art itself changes form, so that again we are struggling against the perfect passage of time, in a silly attempt to reach once more the state of completion that we entered this world with, an attempt I’m reminded of each time I pass by the wall that I’ve marked with my own portrait, knowing all too well that graffiti is “illegal,” as the grown-ups say to one another only because they’ve lost the will or the skill to redefine for themselves what is legal, what is art; and I open my lips to speak, though my portrait is silent so you can hear your own thoughts in your head as you imagine them coming from me (we all scream in different colors), and I will stay in your thoughts like an ugly ghost who you cannot shake, all the while my words (which are actually your words and his words and her words) bubble between your ears, behind your eyes, pulling you back to the moment that I stood in the very same spot with my hand outstretched and the paint in my hands, screaming out to you, persuading, pleading, wishing for you to believe that this — is art.

What I remember most are the non-memories. I remember snapshots, not scenes, thoughts instead of actions, moments but not events. I don’t remember saying goodbye, waiting for the plane, arriving on a probably muggy day (they were all muggy, weren’t they?) in September or any of the basic scenes that accompanied moving to a tiny boarding school in the middle of nowhere on the island that once ruled the world.

But I remember that beach. The beach, the ocean, always left me with that convoluted feeling of endless possibility and inevitable doom. Something about vast, open spaces fills me with a sense of hope and wonder, mitigated by doubts and fears, a kind of certain knowledge that options are limiting, possibilities caging. The beach asked me what I was going to do, whether I would stay or leave, whether it was home I missed or just the myth of home — questions that were met with a dreadful silence. “I don’t know,” I murmured, a shout rising in my throat. But the quiet waves rolled in, so calm a scene that I couldn’t bear to disturb it with my senseless whispers.

The clear days were the worst. Some days were so crisp and light that you could see for miles and sometimes, far off in the distance, you could catch a glimpse of the Isle of Man. I hated those days because on the surface, I knew how beautiful it all was, how lucky I was to catch this sight, the rarity of the opportunity. I knew one day I would miss it, would remember the sunsets and the smell of salt in the air and romanticize it into something it had never been. I’d view the beach as a scene of quiet moments I would share only with my past and future selves, and wonder how I’d let it all drift away. But I resented the island for being there, for proving that I was much more than an ocean away, that the obstacles between the life I lived and the memories I’d abandoned were much too solid.

Sometimes, the beach would overwhelm me and I’d try to stay away. I’d walk along the sea wall instead, close enough to watch but pretend that I was an outsider, one who didn’t belong, just getting from one point to another. I’d read the street names I passed: Westbourne, Shaftesbury, Marlborough — cloak myself in the identity of a traveler, a cold observer, one who saw and thought but felt only moderate curiosity. I watched as boys skipped stones into the sea, and I smiled.

It’s been three years since I stepped foot on that beach for the first time, and my only souvenir from it now lies in a drawing, a flimsy scrap of notepaper I received the night before I left, my year abroad cut short in the middle of February. A teacher I had never gotten along with wrote me a goodbye letter, and on the bottom, she’d drawn the beach at sunset. We had talked about it once, about how the sanguine sky broke into patches of gold and crossing-guard orange, how the sun shined like a ball of fire, falling into the sea, disappearing and leaving behind a paling pink then purple then blue-black sky. I’ll never be sure why she did that.

I don’t remember saying goodbye to the few friends I had made in my time there. I don’t remember packing, my last glance at my room, or the ride to the airport. But I remember the last breath of salty air, the way the wind blew hair into my eyes and the crunch of the sand that got stuck in my shoes as I walked away for the last time.

“Your Uncle Max isn’t quite there.”

My mother would snigger into her pear and walnut salad (low fat dressing). Prattle on about The Kids (who weren’t quite kids anymore), The Boss and That Damned Economy, in between forkfuls of Martha Stewart K-mart collection cutlery. And occasionally she would make fun of her older brother.

I learned to recycle anecdotes. College-is-great-no-I-haven’t-declared-a-major-yes-it-does-get-cold-in-Chicago. The sun bounced off my father’s wristwatch in broken rainbows as he jiggled it tactlessly. We conjured up false promises through small talk and Cole slaw, piled back into the Subaru, and made a mental check mark next to “mandatory family gathering.”

Uncle Max would stand in the corner. He wouldn’t play his banjo but he would hold it—cradle it or something—overstuff two paper plates and never quite look you in the eye. He would fulfill the role of zany, unhinged relative, we would all giggle mechanically and life would rotate the same old circles. Simple.

There was something kind of tragic about Uncle Max. Beneath the grizzled hair, the bemused grin, there was a man trapped in another era. Max was pining for acid-trips, countercultural communes and outdoor concerts. He craved the Haight but he was trapped in suburbia. The present—iPhones, reality television, apathy—was pitiable. The past was supreme.

But it’s laughable, isn’t it? To claim some covert connection with an aging hippie. And yet (probably erroneously) I crafted this intuitive, unspoken bond. You see, secretly I claimed to “get” Uncle Max. I, too—in my own naive, tenuous way—was nostalgic for a nebulous former time.

No, I didn’t grow wistful with visions of eggnog or Easter baskets or candlesticks. For the most part I hated holidays. There was something inevitably trite about the idea that an arbitrary mark on a calendar could automatically dictate happiness. What I missed was much more trivial, unpleasant even. I was nostalgic for things like the beginning of college, when I was scared silly and all impressionable and foolish and lost. I wanted to return to childhood, but just to remember what it felt like to have faith in Hollywood and happenstance. To shudder when someone said “shit” and to be afraid of the dark and the dark alone.

“This is too much.”

My mother chuckled sheepishly, her dinner-party laugh. Switched the track number on the Subaru’s C.D. player. Perhaps Dylan sparked recollections of her UNH years, her own compilation of memories. Unlike my father, who reveled in the opportunity to spin cherished yarns about his zany roommate Mertz or his semester studying in Bologna, her past proved hazy. She had been younger than I, a stick-thin, straw-blonde seventeen-year-old awkwardly skidding toward independence. The car nudged forward, raindrops ricocheting off the trunk door of a mustard-gold Camry. She put the windshield wipers on. Had she ever been close with Max?

He was stuck. The sixties seemed buoyant and syrupy and noble, but the 2000s were uninspired. His brain churned out Beatles’ lyrics and Jack Kerouac quotes: “What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? It’s the too huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye.” Or maybe it wasn’t the era he missed at all. Rather, Max was itching for a former self. Possibly youth, or possibly just the person he once was, in all his callowness, with all his flaws.

I idly toyed with my seat belt, considering. Because of course this was merely speculation (presumptuous too). Unless one calculates companionship by the accumulation of petty formalities, I didn’t really know Uncle Max at all. I didn’t really know any of them.

But it made me feel a little restless inside—like limp feet peaking through the cracks of a balcony—when I met that glazed expression, that jaded stare. I couldn’t help but think I was staring at myself.

I’m waiting. Again.

She said she would be here. I get out of school at the same time everyday. Why can’t she remember this after so many years? Now I’m sitting here, weighed down by burdens upon pounds of bad grades and boring textbooks. I can just feel the straps constricting my arms like snakes, cutting off my circulation. So now I stand, stoicly, remembering the day that just happened. I failed tests, slipped on the steps, lost my wallet. I refuse to believe that a trifecta of this caliber really takes place during one day. How long was today, really? Today was not 24 hours; it was three horrible days lumped together to drag it out and increase my frustration. One bad thing pinned up against another, without even sleep in between to break it up. It’s just all piling up and nothing can be worse than it is right now.

But apparently it can: She forgot about me. She works hard, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. She tries to balance everything. However it is impossible. There’s never a clear schedule, and I’m left to sit here.

I’m still here. Waiting. Staring down.

It’s one of those days, where despite the sun, the wind is too cold and biting. I can’t even look into the distance in anticipation. All I can do is look down. Look at my cold feet that are growing increasingly icy and red as I wait here.

These tracks that take me to and from school are now desolate, but just an hour ago, they were bustling.They’re old and rusted, the kind of aged metal that groans under the pressure of the train cars. An hour ago, when I was supposed to leave.

At least it’s a sunny day. The sun is going down, but at least it was out today. It spent the morning and afternoon blasting us all with its saccharine rays bringing the freckles back to my face, and making people squint. But it will be dark soon; I can hear the crickets gearing up for their impending performance. The stars are starting to sleepily blink their eyes open for the night, soaking up the last bits of sunlight.

But I knew today would be bad. I woke up this morning feeling awful. I got out of bed and…

Why is today such a bad day? I guess maybe it wasn’t so bad. But then again, I can’t quite remember what happened at school. Where even am I? What am I waiting for?

I’m at this old train station, something so normal and common. I’ve been here so many times throughout my life, but it’s out of place now. This isn’t where I’m supposed to be, this isn’t where my home is anymore. I’m not in school anymore; I’ve moved out, moved on. I’m in a different state, with different trains, and more lonely tracks.

There’s no one to wait for. That period is over. I’m somewhere else, somewhere different. There’s no one to wait for.

I’m in my bed, wrapped tightly in a tourniquet of plain sheets. The sun is coming up, shining tiredly through the clouds. There’s no one to wait for here.

Agapito reached into the shallow pool quivering beneath his feet, cupping his hands around the brown-flecked water that lapped at his toes from the canoe’s bottom. He tossed the water behind him and reached again. The dead ship lay ahead, rusted husk tilted on some unseen sandbar. It was close now.

“Ignacio, row.”

Ignacio, in front, dipped his paddle into the water and pulled back. His thin arms and shoulders bent awkwardly towards the green river and he arched his back, as if the water resisted him with some petulant animosity. Three strokes and Ignacio tired. He shrugged and dropped the paddle in the bottom of the canoe.

Agapito bailed more water.

As long as the back doesn’t tip we’ll be okay, he thought. Clear, frightening droplets leapt through the bullethole in the canoe’s side just right of his foot every time the boat wobbled.

There had been three men — or four, circled on shore around a weak fire. One had pointed, said something, the men had laughed and he had aimed his rifle at them. Carelessly, it seemed, as if shooting birds for sport. He fired. One in the water before them, two behind, and the fourth which pierced the canoe. The men had laughed again. Agapito had looked back, awaiting more shots, but the men already had their backs to him. They wore camouflaged pants and t-shirts — whether they were rebels or out-of-uniform soldiers Agapito couldn’t tell.

“Ignacio. Keep rowing, little brother.” It had been twenty minutes—probably—and they wouldn’t float much longer. Agapito was tired and the river still pumped water through the hole.

How long to the ship? Five minutes? Seven? Enough time, he thought. Keep bailing, keep rowing. He could see a lifeboat sitting intact at the ship’s stern. They would sleep in the ship that night, let the canoe finally sink and set out safe in the lifeboat in the morning.

When the soldiers came to burn their home, grandmother had sent them to find uncle Fidel and his truck in Dingras. They would reach his home tomorrow, drive back up to the village with Fidel and pick her up. All four of them would leave the smoldering village behind. Return to Dingras, live safe again.

“Row, Ignacio.”

Ignacio grasped his paddle like a dagger and stabbed the river, tearing at its belly as he squinted ahead. Green water stretched into forest, green on green, ancient trees exhaling mist that commingled with drooping gray clouds. A sudden flash of red amid the trees, then silence.

“Agapito, did you see that?” The child pointed at the woods but his older brother said nothing.
Two flashes, three — yellow and green and purple, harsh flitting of some animal dodging behind trees in the woods. Ignacio watched, transfixed, the trees seeming to glow orange as the colors raged behind and among them.

“Agapito, do you see it?”

Ignacio saw a bird emerge from the treeline. Its orange beak glowed and yellow crown feathers trailed regally behind, undulating like ribbons along its blue back and purple tail. The air around it crackled like static—bright firecracker pops, smell of sulfur.

“Agapito. Look.”

“I see nothing. Enough with your visions. You see too many things. Keep rowing.”

They rowed in silence until they reached the ship. Agapito stood in the middle of the canoe and lifted his pointy-boned brother onto the ship’s ledge, hopping up after him. The canoe turned over on its side and sank. The river gurgled once and the small boat was gone.

***

Ignacio sat on the ship’s upper deck, near the smokestack, grabbing his knees. A small fire sputtered on the deck before them. Agapito had rekindled the still-warm embers of recent visitors to the decrepit vessel, adding half-dry wood and matches he had found in a storage chamber.

“Ignacio.” The young boy looked up at his brother. “Do you still see things?”

“Yes.”

“What do you see?’

Ignacio gazed past their tiny fire. In the dusk the trees and river seemed to melt together, no demarcation between rippling water and swaying branches. One deep green, one vast ancient swell—river and forest, blurred, indistinguishable.

“Fire. I see fire — orange and red, smoke. Smoke everywhere. It smells like the village, everything is burning. But no one screams here, just fire. And there’s a bird.”

“A bird?”

“He’s huge — bigger than a truck, and he flies. He’s all colors, yellow and orange and green. But there are pops and bangs all around him. Little explosions. I think the men are trying to shoot him.”

“What men?”

Ignacio was silent. Agapito looked up. The treeline was dark, an enveloping green-brown — no colors, no fires, no bird. He watched the boy sadly.

“I need to go check out our lifeboat.”

“No. Stay here.”

Agapito knelt and squeezed Ignacio’s shoulder. “We need to get off this ship tomorrow. Uncle Fidel is close now. I need to look at our lifeboat or else we can’t leave.”

“What if the fires come back?”

“Then you tell me.” Agapito stood and began walking away from his brother, towards the lifeboat.

“What if they shoot the bird?”

Agapito stopped. “They won’t.”

“How do you know?”

“Try to go to sleep. We’ll leave in the morning.”

Agapito turned and headed back towards the stern. He descended a rough iron staircase that led to the ship’s lowest, back-most edge. The boat was upside-down, covered with a plastic tarp. He threw back the tarp, scattering the skeletal rats hiding beneath. It was sturdier than he had feared: thick, strong wood, held together with stout iron bolts.

Grunting, he turned the boat right-side-up. Tomorrow they would just have to push it into the water and they would be on their way again. Now time for sleep, he thought. Agapito laid the tarp over the boat again and was about to head back up the steps when he saw vague shapes approaching on the water.

Orange, with small dark forms on top. A raft. Agapito froze. Soldiers, making their way to the ship from shore. Through the dimness he could make out the inhuman points of their rifles.

He was up the stairs and at Ignacio’s side in a moment.

“Get up, we have to go now.”

Agapito hefted Ignacio to his feet and they ran toward the stern and down the iron steps. Agapito threw off the tarp and they pushed the boat into the water. The elder brother climbed in and lowered Ignacio down second.

Agapito cursed. “The oars. We don’t have our oars.”

He climbed onto the ship and sprinted back to their fire, up the stairs again and across the top deck. He could see the orange raft no longer, but he heard the soldiers talking in the fore. They were on the ship. The oars lay near the fire. He grabbed them, turned, ran back down the steps two at a time.  He heard gunshots behind him.The boat had already begun to drift away. He leapt into the river, kicking in the dark water, flailing, arms weighed down by the oars.

He reached the boat and climbed inside, shivering and wet. Ignacio did not move.

“Are you okay?” Agapito asked.

The boy stared into the woods, hands clasping his knees, white-knuckled. He did not respond.

“Are the trees still on fire?”

“Yes.”

“Did they shoot the bird?”

Ignacio shook his head.

“Where is he?”

Ignacio pointed downriver. “He’s above us, down there. Look how bright his feathers are! He’s making sure there’s no danger up ahead. ”

Agapito did not respond for some time. The night was colorless, clouded. He could see no birds.

“Good,” he finally said.

The boys picked up their oars and rowed, dragging the boat through the misty verdure, woods and water and sky the sickly hue of smoke. Their small fire may have burned still near the ship’s smokestacks, but they dared not look back. They glided into the dark, no sound but the gurgle of the river, no smell but the dank sweat of forest.

I remember I was sitting at my desk starting my homework when the phone rang. I checked the caller ID and saw it was my mom. She knew never to call me from six to eight, when I was usually just starting my homework, so I knew something was wrong. I answered the phone and said hello, maybe a bit too hastily or rushed. I remember my mom trying (but failing) to tell me in a calm, unwavering voice, without crying, that my grandfather had died.

She continued on, with her voice trembling stronger and stronger each second, that the cancer had spread to his lungs and that he had passed away peacefully in his sleep. I guess she thought I would take comfort in that he had died in his sleep, but I felt as if I wouldn’t be able to take comfort in anything ever again. I remember feeling like everything had dropped away. It wasn’t exactly sadness because it is an emotion. It was the absence of sadness, the absence of everything. I was just numb.

When I was younger, I remember going to the Illinois Railway Museum with my grandfather every summer. My mom drove down the familiar roads to his house, and I was in the front seat, eagerly peeking out the window the entire ride, with my velcro shoes barely grazing the floor. We turned the corner onto his street and he was waiting for us outside in his garden. As soon as the car stopped, I jumped out and ran up to him, and he gave me a warm hug.

He took me to the museum in his Oldsmobile. Once we got out, we spent all day looking at the different trains. I remember being fascinated by the giants, weathering all storms, trundling along the tracks to their destinations, virtually impossible to derail. But, my favorite exhibit was the one that chronicled the death of the railway industry. It talked about how they were an obsolete form of transportation, but the rails were laid across the country and couldn’t be ignored or removed. So, even though the industry was virtually nonexistent these days, the trains kept running.

I began packing right after I got off the phone with my mom. I think I may even have hung up on her, I don’t really remember. It was a Wednesday afternoon when I got the call, and the funeral was going to be that Sunday, so I had to come home as soon as I could get a train ticket. It felt weird packing a day’s worth of black clothes, knowing their purpose. I left a note for my roommate saying I had to run for the weekend, something came up, and that he shouldn’t worry.

I sat down and emailed my professors that I was going to be absent the next few days. I was wondering how much information is appropriate for such an email – do I just tell them I need to go out of town, do I get a bit more specific and say there was a family emergency, or do I charge in guns blazing and say there was a death in the family? I don’t think I could have brought my self to write that last one; it would be acknowledging a fact I had refused to acknowledge. I decided to just forget it and leave town that night. Nothing seemed to matter anymore.

My grandfather survived two wars and two divorces. His oldest son, my uncle, was killed in a car crash, and his youngest daughter, my aunt, drowned when she was a young girl. He’s lived, and he’s seen terrible things nobody should ever have to see. Things that beat you to your knees and make you beg for mercy. But he always kept fighting. He never once thought about quitting, always pressing on, moving forward, weathering all storms, trundling along the tracks to his destination, impossible to derail. He was immovable, imperturbable. And now, he’s gone.

And now I’m standing here on this deserted, almost dilapidated platform, years of disuse apparent in the cracks and slope of the wood, waiting for the 6:04 train to take me back to the town I know so well. I check the watch he gave me last June as a graduation present — any minute now. The air is crisp and the sun is just beginning to set over the trees. I can feel the rumbling of the train passing through the metal rails beneath my feet and the concussive horn blast lets me know the train will be arriving shortly. The familiar rhythmic beat of the engine entrances and envelops me. It peeks around the mountain, coming into view, the silver body reflecting the setting sunlight and sending millions of beautiful rays in every direction. The train slows down and stops at the platform, the mechanical doors open, and the smiling station agent beckons me onto the car.

I’m coming home, grandpa.

The mug of beer faced me. It was a challenge, a threat. The bar patrons’ watchful eyes were oppressive. I knew I should never have come back here. The town is too small, the people too small-minded. The demons too real. Moving away after that fateful night, the night of the accident, had seemed the best move I could have made. We were all too young to comprehend the consequences of our revelry.

It’s really funny how things change. Once, a six-pack of beer would have signified a night of spontaneity or relaxation, of bullshitting about whatever there was to ponder. Nights like those seemed the gateway to our freedom; freedom from the strip malls, the commercialism, the patchwork facades of our parents. We all knew they weren’t really happy, but that realization came in a way which can only be described as the quintessential “loss of innocence” moment, that our teachers preached to us for years.

Now, here I am. Back here. I never thought it would happen. Until my mom’s death, there was no reason for me to come back. No happy memories remained, everything was tainted with the ugly sorrow of loss. Earlier today I visited my old school, just for the hell of it, but nothing looked the same. The grayness obliterated the charm. The playground looked dilapidated, weeds sprung out from the spidery cracks in the cement, the paint was chipping. Here was where our childhoods started, our friendships. I guess time really does have a way of eroding everything; it has successfully eroded my memories and emotions. It’s strange how my emotions seem … disparate, disused. I am disintegrating like my playground. Like my friends, buried too far into the ground.

Never again will I look upon them, never will their dreams come true. The burden of surviving is on me, but at times I find I’m jealous. Why should I be the one to have to go on, infused with these parasitic memories that have devoured the remainder of my other, happier memories? Grayness permeates this town. The sky, the roads, the sidewalks, the dirt, the old snow, the people and the buildings are all dressed in shades of gray.

Outside of this place there is life. Here there is only the imitation of life. People practicing social rituals they deem to be part of the norm — if only they could see just how off base they are. They are numb, yet they pretend that they are completely satisfied. Or perhaps they do believe they are satisfied. That was our problem, we were too visionary, and we realized that there was more to life than this town. But, like the town, we succumbed to the centripetal pattern of drinking. We got caught up in it.

And now the mug glares at me, a challenge. I must resist the confrontation. I can feel the dozens of eyes piercing my back as they stare at me, the prodigal, waiting to see my decision. I hate knowing what others are thinking. I know that they think I am the one at fault because I lived, I know that they feel sorry that I returned for my mother’s funeral, and am now completely without connections in this world, and I know that in their perverse mind they want to see me pick up that drink. They want to see me fail, to succumb, to become like them.

With my last shred of pride, instilled within me only by memories of my friends, whose lives were wasted with this poison, I turned on my heel and fled from the bar. Sip, don’t guzzle, perhaps those sagacious words should be heeded. I’m still learning to live in moderation. I practice everyday, but I think the best way to improve is to remove the unhealthy source. After her funeral I left that town forever.