In May, the light in and around our apartment changes. I discover all over again how many windows to nowhere the apartment seems to have, windows that just face other people’s windows. Light steals in through some elaborate ruse during the summer months. When I first moved into this apartment, it was December 2020 and the room I was in had a window that only faced west. I would wake up in complete darkness, go to work, and then when I left work it would be dark again. I began to have recurring dreams where I would discover hidden windows in the apartment where light would come in. In the dreams I stood by the sunny windows, in awe of what I’d missed.
The other day I was so struck by the sight of our dark kitchen lit by the yellow glow of light from the usually sunless window that I had to take a picture of it. I thought, right now, this kitchen looks like a memory I will have one day.
I am made for nostalgia; it is what I’m for. I miss people all the time. Every song and street corner must be imbued with associations of the past in order for me to have experienced it. The other day I was on a crowded train, no seats available, and it made me miss the cold months when I first moved to Boston and the train would be empty. Completely empty. The car to myself. No one on board. No one was going to work. No one was going to class. In my journal entries at the time I wrote that these were the worst months of my life. Why do I miss it? My memories have softened. There’s something frightening about the lack of objectivity; there’s something forgiving about it too.
It’s hard to hang onto the version of myself that lived in those memories. There are too many of them, maybe. I keep looking back to them following after me, growing more faded by the second. Last month I changed the way I wrote w’s. Such a small change, and it was a relief to feel like I was stepping away from the self-that-was-gone into the self-that-was-new.
And what of these moments now? Will my memories soften this time for me too? How will I think about the week I watched my friends get arrested, my skin sweating off the phone number for the national lawyers guild hotline over and over and over, crying so much and yelling so much that I lose my voice for a week, hoping against hope that the nightmare would end?
Will remembering this time be easy one day, even if living it was not?