I’m back in the college town and some things just doesn’t feel right.
Everything is perfect, even the weather. A bit too perfect. Sunny Sunday afternoon, clusters of people hanging out in outdoor restaurants decorated with hanging plants and shiny tiles; bikers gathering and bbq in the park chatting and singing. Smiles on faces. I almost get excited when I saw a dead squirrel on the neatly cut grass. Yes I’m looking for the familiar foul smells and dirty corners. Familiarity, or is that something of an illusion from the past too.
Seeing the bikers, now I wonder where my bike is now. Bike never get killed. One summer I left my bike out for three months and later it’s still ridable. It was on that bike when I was robbed by gun point in this park. But I was never afraid of anything. In the late night darkness I almost felt I live with a special purpose.
Maybe that was just loneliness I didn’t want to accept, my therapist would say. That at some point you fit into the shape of it.
I’m sitting on this particularly nice bench next to the gigantic robotic library, in front of which I used to have a picture of me holding a stack of paper for my best dissertation award. The only thing I remember was that stack of papers meant so much to me. Everyone I knew from the old days have left, and the quad is empty in the summer. I remember this annoying pre-med Asian kid from my first year writing class, who told me that if I walk across the campus without people saying hi to me then I’m a failure. On that very day, crossing this very patch of grass, I started to wave to people. And I have lost contact with all those people I waved at too. I don’t even write in English any more.
The familiarity didn’t kick in until I saw a Chinese guy walking by. Head down fixed on his phone. This is what I was looking for. The past me. I walk pass monuments of my past, backtracking the exact time point I start to be this depressed, in a true Laconic fashion. Second year party? The Premed kid? I have to admit, no. I was happy. I was happier. I was enjoying what I later understood as the white people standard of freedom. I didn’t appreciate it enough then. I’ve lost it all.
Now this is the block where a younger kid from my department got murdered. I lost two nights of sleep hearing the news.
There was a period of my life when I had no fear of anything, danger, harm, even loneliness. I wear my dad’s old jacket and stroll around midnight. Moon shine on the snow glowing yellowish under streetlights. I was, as a matter of fact, very young.
Maybe something had already hit me back then.