I came across this little bit going through my "Writing' folder on my computer. I wrote this the summer before my last semester at CU and in Boulder. Allison was planning her departure to Chicago and the buildings all seemed to forecast the emptying of space that would manifest in many different ways in the coming year. At that time, many shops were still closing down in the downtown of Boulder. Some had sat empty at least since late 2000. This bit is over two years old but the sense of "moving to the peripherary of life" is very relvevant to my present context....
The thought comes today of being left behind somehow. Being left behind but also being rooted, perhaps too rooted. It is strange to think that something concerning my experiences during the last two years has changed. I will go back to school a ghost. Perhaps it is telling that I want to write stories about empty buildings and storefronts, thatI gaze down into the deep tears in the ground that the backhoes make along Broadway. There must be some part of myself already in those uncovered dark spaces, those insubstantial, fleeting places. Times like that, where you see a sliver of yourself standing like a ghost in the middle of an empty shop floor, are times that require intense concentration on who you are about to become, because it is uncertain. For me, the very idea of transformation is also loaded with a concept of value. Transformation is charged with the possibility of it all going to shit in an instance. Really, of course, this is the present writing itself into the future, trying to lodge some kind of reality of itself there. This is the present saying I am permanent and real, not just a doorjamb between past and future. But really it is nothing but an opening, but again this opening seems like the real thing, the thing that we will be soon.
But the fleeting, left behind feeling, is really just regret, right? Aren’t I concerned that all of the past will mean nothing very shortly? It seems that way. I am beginning to feel irrelevant and replaced in the throbbing center of the idea of what is important to me. It seems somehow that the future, that adult life, such as it is, is about moving to the periphery and maintaining a graceless pose there. It seems like hoisting your leg into a ray of light to watch it be refracted away, broken at the kneecap by illusion.
