I Miss the Past

As the seasons come back every year I am reminded that as time passes versions of myself pass too.

So much of my time is spent looking at the sidewalk, walking, thinking, strategizing. It is the same everywhere, sidewalk. I am enamored with them because they are on the sides of roads and roads, theoretically, can and do go anywhere and everywhere else. Yet it is the cracks that I’ve grown fondest of. Every winter the ice makes them more exaggerated and I wonder if the winter does similar things to cracks inside of me.

I remember winters before.

We used to hook the sled up behind the three wheeler. Mom would look upset because we left tire tracks in the snow. It looked like heaven there from the inside of the trailer. I sat on the floor playing video games… Final Fantasy 7… daydreaming. What is my story line?

The winter I came home from Basic Training. I fell in love with a boy but I couldn’t bring myself to touch him. I put all the money the Army gave me up my nose. I woke up in the snow, my nose bleeding, and I was all alone foot tracks leading to where I lay from campus.

The winter I was deployed my textual love, Frigga77 sent me paper snowflakes in an envelope. We celebrated winter in a dream.

The next winter, when I was home, I moved in with Scott. He was selling weed and going to school. I was sleeping on a round papasan cushion. I met Katy in a bar. We both hated men. We held hands in the snow. There was this feeling. It was very real. It ended, both of us crying in my car, bummed out that I couldn’t be who we wanted me to be.

I was in Chicago the next time the snow came. I was in love with Laura this time. Smoking Marbloro Reds with open contempt on our faces, the sheer gruesomeness of that cities Winter nothing in comparison with the spite in Laura’s eyes. Raw, psychological, sex, the kind that one needs, unhealthy, horrible. Every night. The scene ends badly: The apartment is covered in her blood, love poems to me, or so the cop says. Turns out she’d slit her wrists. Our friends found her in the bathroom and nursed her back to health. A video was released. Her wrists with pink gauze bandages, a lengthy and boring ordeal about how she loved a soldier. I vomited in the stairwell and fell asleep in my car in the cold crying. I was on mushrooms. Happy Birthday.

There was the all white winter I spent with Jamie hiding a giant lie. I had been unfaithful. But the truth came out. She punched me… I grabbed her hand. I thought… is this really what has become of my life? She told me that I cheated because I did not really love her and she was right… but I didn’t know it then. I needed so badly for this to be love. Because love is the only thing I ever thought could fix me, could fill this thing inside of me. That was the winter that I became a Winter Soldier.

I spent one wandering around Europe going from bed to bed as if I were on a mission to fuck the whole world. I was so poor.

For the next I was in Chicago, alone in a room I could not afford, trying to find work, desperately writing a manuscript on a dirty floor next to an old futon mattress that I slept on in my clothing. I knew I’d never love again.

Now it is this winter. There are no hands to hold, or love stories to speak of. My lovers have all forgotten me or moved on to more reasonable options. I am squatting on the floor of a collective house in Philadelphia, my suitcase packed and ready to go at all times. I print shirts now. It brings me something like joy. I miss the emotional turbulence of my former years. I miss the pain of passion. I miss the drama of love. Now my walks are quiet and I think only of me. All of the funny things that I see and all of the stupid ideas I have are lost forever, never shared.

How big will these cracks grow? When will this sidewalk become unserviceable?