Darling, your head’s not right

The other week, I went up to Duluth for a Great Big Dreams show and wandered the halls of the school for the first time in over a year. During the three+ years I was a student there, I stalked those hallways nightly like some pale zombie. Even when I didn’t live on campus anymore, I’d drive there on late nights and get coffee and read in the blue student lounge or walk slow laps around the school, just getting my head together. In the afternoons, I’d eat my lunch in a far corner of the Kirby Cafe, carefully hiding, or, if feeling extra intruded upon, I’d take a tray up to the Rafters, and sit by the fireplace with my back to the door. I did a lot of hiding my last year at UMD, which was easy considering the millions of dark little corners and alcoves stashed in each hallway.

Nothing’s the same there anymore, and not just in the metaphorical since. When I graduated high school, the county demolished the building that summer and slapped up a fancy new one for the incoming students. That felt strange, but fitting since the old school I knew would never be the same once I left it, anyway.

But UMD — well. The hallways are new and green and white and bright. The Cafe in which I spent so many lonely and quiet afternoons, hunched over my notebooks, is a Multi-Cultural Center. The Rafters is clean and the tables and the fireplace and the TV nook are gone. The Bullpub, where so many firsts happened for me — kisses, fights, jazz shows — is a hallway now. A hallway! It leads to a huge, elaborate dining center and coffee shop and I walked through all of this with what amounted to a large cartoon question mark hovering above my head. How did this happen? How dare they destroy my memories? The demolished high school building was one thing; this, however, was like your down-to-earth best friend going off to Cancun for a summer and coming back with a fake tan and long pink nails. I didn’t recognize anything.

My body and mind are full of places that don’t exist: my corner in the Cafe, the spot in the Rafters (the night we stretched out on the floor at midnight and he put his hand on my stomach). The Ballroom remains, but the nostalgia will kill me, anyway. The fact that I can’t go back to these places spins my brain into oblivion. Give me books on the philosophy of spacetime. Even good memories hurt — because I have times when I remember and then times when I remember, deep in my bones, to the roots of my hair.

Seasons bring this on for me. My senses are extra-bright. Spring is his button-up shirts, the smell of Griggs Beach, the first and last people I didn’t feel strange around — all connected to this now non-existent school. The group of people I met there, now dispersed, haven’t been replaced in any form; here, even with good people, I feel a little off, a little strange. We knew what we had then, my friends and I. We didn’t waste it. We wrestled it by the neck, flayed it in the sun, burned the hide. We held so hard we exploded.

I still remember my Goldfine room at 4 PM, the sunlight striping the bed — the afternoons I’d flop down before rehearsal, waiting for my boyfriend to come home and waiting for my friends to knock on the door and and so excited to be waiting at all.

I don’t think this goes away. I can’t figure out the evolution of space and time. I’ve written about it a thousand different ways. We used to love each other in the shabby walls of that school — all of us, running up the still-snowy March hill before sunrise, knowing exactly what was happening and how wobbly it was. The sadness comes because I can’t beat that — young, pretty, 19, in a pile of my best friends, mouth open for the sun on the lake, falling in love with everything, stretching my arms over Lake Superior. That was it for me — my moment. The rest is the wistful aftermath, someone else’s story.

Posted by: Zosia | 03-30-2005 | 08:03 PM
Posted in: General