The past recedes even when the future does not approach.

I realized, the other day, that I had for some time forgotten to feed your ghost the diet of nostalgia, half-imagined memories and too-fond reminiscences on which it subsisted. Back when it was new, when I snapped it off of you like a cutting from a vine, I carried it with me everywhere. It was a terrible companion. It claimed to love me, and probably it did. When I tried, hesitantly, to find someone new, it mocked me in just the way I mock myself. When I tried to walk down the street and empty my mind, to fill myself with the sound of wind through the trees, it would blow the scent of your perfume across my face. When I spoke with you it wound itself around me and squeezed, and in a quiet scream insisted "She'll come back she'll come back you're not alone she'll change her mind." I think it really did believe that. I loathed its idiot droning, its irreparable sentimentality, and I hated myself because I could neither correct it nor banish it... and I must admit that I did not want to. It was the worst friend, the very worst, but it was there. It was my pretend-loneliness, my little game, and without it I would have to look at the cruel, cloudless sky and let the life stream from my eyes out into the void.

I think you saw it once, and if it scared you, what can I say? It scared me too, sometimes. Often.

It's dead now, anyways. I went looking for it and I couldn't find it, just a few wisps of ectoplasm smeared across a canvas. It's gone to the second afterlife, the land of the dead for whom no one pays remembrance. But one thing more is left: its own ghost, a shadow of a shadow, a feeling like emptiness... or more like void. Not an empty room, but no room at all. Once I kept a cup which I would fill with your essence. When it began to grow dry, I poured myself into it, because I could not bear to see it empty. But now even the cup is gone. All that remains is an epitaph.

And now that is done too.

Two roads, two bridges, one river: Race relations, transportation, and the way I walk to work

I live in a college town and work on campus. On the mornings I don't carpool with my roommates, I walk downtown to the nearest campus bus stop to catch a bus in to work. There are two optimal ways to get there by walking; each way is about as long as the other, so I tend to alternate. I'll call them North Ave and the back way. North Ave is a highway five lines wide with lights, intersections, and sidewalk on either side. Turning out of our neighborhood onto North Ave, a beautiful view of the downtown skyline is visible over a scenic railroad trestle that passes over the road at the same place it passes over the river, down at the bottom of the hill. North Ave is lined with new, spacious, and dense housing: rental housing for the numberless college students who want to be within walking distance of the night life. Taking North Ave down the hill means crossing at the bridge beneath the trestle. When I cross that bridge I always turn and look up the river; it is a small river, about fifty feet across, but very slow and deep. It has dignity, and even after heavy rains it flows along with the same solemn stillness. Beneath the bridge, on either side of the river, is the homeless encampment. The banks of the river are public park, so they can stay there during daytime all they like. In the grass of the riverbank a network of dirt clearings and paths have been beaten in by constant comings and goings. Semicircles of molding lawn furniture, fire pits, and a scum of beer cans mark the enclaves of the homeless: their friendships, groups, and territories. They ignore me as I ignore them; to them I am another anonymous face in the heavy stream of foot traffic that passes by. As for me, I think they're mostly harmless, but I worry late at night, or when I see a group of them talking and glancing at me. There's a police station just across the street, and an alarm kiosk on the corner nearest them, so I have to trust them to know better than to cause trouble. Across the river is the high road; but first, the back street:

Turning right out of my neighborhood instead of left, there is a road that runs behind our carefully manicured townhouses, along the railroad. Here, at the top of the hill, it runs alongside the road at the bottom of a twenty-foot deep gash blasted into the bedrock. Neat semi-cylindrical scars are visible in the crumbling rock walls, spaced at precise intervals: presumably marking where the blasting charges were placed.  A concrete footbridge with a nearly-complete cage of chain-link fence crosses over the tracks.  The inward-curving tops of the narrow fences make a silhouette like a Gothic arch with a fallen keystone. On the other side of this footbridge is what I think of as the neighborhood. From two driveways and strange sort of hilltop parking lot the road coalesces hesitantly, making a sort of beleaguered split-level cul-de-sac that spills precipitously down the hill, heading for the river directly. Homes line the street; real homes, not rental crates. Some are run down; at least one, I feel sure, is abandoned. Others are clearly cared for and long lived-in. Some sport excessive lawn decorations, and some expensive cars. A low wall of stacked stone lines the road for a few yards; it looks old enough to be native. The residents of this neighborhood, so far as I can tell, are all black and lower-class. They congregate in the street smoking and talking. When I walk down the road, most days they ignore me and I ignore them. I try not to walk through the middle of them, but I also try not to go so far out of my way that I draw attention to myself. It's an awkward situation for me; probably less so for them. I don't believe many people at all take the back way through their home. At the bottom of the hill is the lower of the river roads; away across the broad floodplain and the river is the homeless encampment. Barely visible through brush and at least one hundred yards away, it doesn't mean anything from over here.

This is the second leg of either route: the river roads. On the far side, the side I live on, lawns of bright grass slope gently up from the river about a hundred feet to the road. This is more park, dotted with benches, picnic tables and one small parking lot. On the other side of the road is neighborhood. The houses with a good view of the water tend to be well-maintained. A few look only into marshy scrub, and these are a bit more run-down. One house in particular has a lovely stand of bamboo and sits next to an odd empty lot; the whole thing lies in a depression and is covered in bright green creepers. On the far side, two identical ancient microwaves sit stacked one atop the other. Old tires and concrete pipes lie in a ditch. At one point, they were assembled into a sort of monument. Whether it was intended to resemble a penis is an internal debate I have yet to conclude. On the other side of the river, dry scrub covers a narrow, steep embankment running up to a massive stone wall that stands twenty feet high and runs for a quarter mile. Steel handrails and faux-iron lampposts top it like the filigree and jewels of a crown. On top of that wall is the second river road: the high road. The high road has a nice view of the river, though the height makes it seem small. It is broad, well-lit, and faced by row after row of tall, bland townhouses. It shares this side of the river with the multi-modal bus station, the conference center, the police station, and further, the entirety of downtown. These two roads run on either side of the river for a quarter mile to the rusted steel trestle bridge that connects them. My two paths intersect at the corner that is home to a local down-home restaurant, near one of the shadier parts of town, lying low and dark in the swampy old growth at the river's edge. Just up the hill is downtown and my bus stop.

Today, while walking down to said restaurant, I took the back way and the low road. A few old black men where sitting in the back road smoking. They shifted and went inside when they saw me coming, but one called out to me. I said hello and kept walking, but a conversation ensured nonetheless.

"You from around here, son?"
"Yep, I live just up the road."
He fanned a handful of scratched lottery tickets at me.
"See now, we have this friend they're tryna put away, if there's anything you can do to help--"
"I don't think I can help with that."
"Oh, alright, but if you change your mind, you can always leave it in our mailbox right there."
"Alright, thank you."
"Thank you, God bless."

If you're confused by this conversation, don't be alarmed. I was confused as well. What friend? Put away for what? By whom? What was the point of the tickets? Was I supposed to buy one? Was he trying to win and buy his friend a legal defense? And of course, the whole thing reeked of random panhandling. But why ask if I was local and then panhandle me? Isn't it better to get people from out of town? And what was up with the mailbox bit? Is this some kind of local political cause? Regardless of the reason and whether or not it was all just a complicated panhandle, it was clear now that walking through that neighborhood would result in requests for money in some form. They know my face now; I'm worried that they'll bother me again or harass me if I walk back through. I took the high road to get back home, and resented it. The clean, broad, sterile street was the lot that society had earmarked for me, just as the vibrant but dilapidated homes across the river were the black part of town. Walking past informative plaques describing the history behind this stretch of river, I felt comfortable and safe. I felt that I was in my proper place. I want to walk past that old stone wall, past the trailer with a lawn full of flamingos, past the stand of bamboo and the microwave lot, but none of that is my place. My place is with the joggers, the college kids, the towering apartments in inoffensive colors, and the streetlamps every twenty feet that make sure the road never sees darkness. By panhandling me, the locals made it clear that I am not a neighbor to them; I'm a score. They let me know that I was not in my place.

I don't know what to write,

but I know I want to. So fuck it. Here goes.

Looking back at my old poetry is always a trip. Reading the things I wrote a long time ago wakes up parts of me that were asleep. Seeing my reflection in the paper is like seeing a ghost. I had a certain style, then. It was Stephen King's style, to be fair, but it was something.

I feel I have made it through a crisis in my life, and I see in it the roots of the inevitable crisis to follow: I have finally succeeded in casting off the urge to do with my life what others expect. I am resigned to and comfortable with the prospect of living an unremarkable, uneventful life, provided it is fairly comfortable. I think that some part of me, maybe the greater part, wants to "do something" with my life, and if that is so, it may be able to emerge now without being channeled through others' expectations. I won't make it come, though. I am relaxing. I think it may have taken several months for my subconscious or what have you to realize it, but I am finally relaxing. It is the contentment that comes not from knowing all of your obligations are fulfilled, but from having no obligations, and wanting none. I don't want to do this or do that. I don't want a career, I don't want a family, I don't want a degree (at least not right now). I don't want to go down in history, I don't want to change the world, I don't want to make a difference. I just want to chill the fuck out, listen to music, eat good food, and have a few good friends. That doesn't mean I can't have long-term goals and aspirations; just that I don't need them. I was raised with the impression that it was my destiny to help mankind in some enormous way, and that's a big shadow to live under; the shadow of your potential. Bigger for me than for most, not to be an arrogant dick. My life was a vehicle built to take me from the present to that world-shaking future, but I had only the vaguest notion of that future, and each time I felt it should have come closer, like a mirage it was just as far away. I reject utterly the notion that I must be "productive" in the way that proves my worth to society, and I will produce as little as possible until I feel I have established the sincerity of my belief to myself. I hope that once I have reached utter relaxation and unconcern, my innate interests and desires will become clear. I have always had poor emotional intelligence and have for a long time flat emotionally; it makes sense, then, that I need a sort of emotional quiet to be able to understand how I feel. All I have to do is chill out.