Never Seen

newtheoryoldlove:

     The next time you are walking down a familiar suburban sidewalk right as the sunset is fading, stop. 

     Stop dead in your tracks. 

     Don’t worry about seeming silly. Don’t watch for supercilious stares. Stand still. Not at an intersection, nor at a mailbox, nor at a lamppost. Stop in the middle of a step that you are expected to finish. Stop, and if you blink your eyes and still know where you are, stop that, too. 

     Just stop.

     Stop and imagine that you have been dropped from the sky to where you now stand. 

     Stop, and tell me when the air starts to get familiar. I am curious. Does it take months to get to know, does it take in it to grow?

     I have returned to childhood bedrooms that seem as foreign as they once flowed, brick like bones and painted veins that once signified home, so let me ask you, what’s the difference between the first time you laid eyes on that birthday gift and the fiftieth, what’s the difference between old wrinkled lips and fresh ones pursed to kiss, what’s the difference between the stoplight you pass every day to work and one you’ve never seen or heard, 

     or felt. Cold, stagnant, scintillating. 

     See, I am midthought and midstep ambling past Maine street as usual and I walk into a thick wall called jamais vu. At first I wonder, is this okay? That’s what our social conceptions have done to our freedoms: convert them into anxieties, is this okay. I allow myself an exasperated sigh and glance around, and then, I stop minding them, freeze, and take a look around. 

     The next time you are reducing everything in your life to postulations of the past, stop. 

     I tell myself that I have never walked past this place before. The house across the street, the power lines and the slope, the trees across the way and the parking lot stretch, I have never experienced this town before. The buildings refuse me and I let them, diaphanous things they’ve become, I stop looking at them as if I know them by name, convinced that they are generic facades on a typical small-town street. It works. This scene, this could be from anywhere, any picture, any movie. My memories of this place might set it apart, but what good is the familiarity if it makes me skim over? Is it not indolent for me to stop seeing, to stop noticing? To look at things and see the past but not the present? 

     We think that it would enervate our world-weary minds to treat old things as new, but this is a lie. It enervates us to stop seeing and to stop wondering, to stop learning like uprooted hearts still beating with bewilderment. 

     So, I let it feel new. The bricks and arches, the spaces in between, the crosswalk and the lawn extending left of me. It feels so new that I am hopeful I might break out of my bridle with teeth snarling, hooves stamping, and mind reared. It feels so new that I am afraid I am lost completely; that if you dropped me here in a dream I wouldn’t be able to recognize it or gain my bearings, wouldn’t be able to find my way home. 

     I hate that memory is a blessing and a curse like this; if it was one or the other, I’d have my answers. Instead I stand in the dimming summer air, simmering thin, wondering if I have been spending my entire life trying to be someone else without intending it. Taking after someone else’s clothes, someone else’s lines, someone else’s style, someone else’s home. I don’t want that. I’m standing here in the middle of the sidewalk and cars are passing and people are walking off in all directions and I’m looking at the cement in front of me like I’ve never seen it before, and all of a sudden this is when I feel more independent than I have felt all my life.

     It is a short moment. I am unhooked. I am original. I am vast. 

     So it follows that in all the other moments, I must be a slave. 

     This is how I want it to break down: the gift of metaphysical molting. To crawl out of my own skin and then look at it, oneiric, lying on dirty sheets and taking wonder in the feel—these are my eyes, this is my nose, I’ve seen it before but never this close. This is home and this is not home, this is familiar but still just as bold. 

     Sometimes I look at the ceilings, at the walls of my room, at the old tree by the Burton house or the glass panels in the back and I think of them as unique and unexperienced, and it does a wonderful thing—it makes me discover them again, more than I discovered before. Besides, it doesn’t really matter where you’re going as long as you’ve got eager eyes as you walk. 

     As far as the fear of the unknown goes, while I’m pausing on that sidewalk afraid of getting lost, I can still raise my head to the sky and inhale as deeply as I want. I do not need landmarks or welcome mats. I want novel lights in bygone dawns, and only your billets-doux to anchor me down. Olfaction, see, is the greatest trigger of memory; and for me, it’s all the ones that I want to keep, and so if I’m dropped like a needle on a record I can’t recognize, I will trace the air for the scent of your skin. You are the only home I need to get me through the fear of unfamiliarity. And besides, this is what new experience is about, after all—to change yourself and go back to the start so that you can find, there, everything you want. 

     You see, it’s funny—they say there are as many galaxies as grains of sand in all the beaches of the whole world, but I can never understand why this makes people want to see space. I tell them, it makes me want to see beaches.