The Marketing of Memory

I walked home from school on the last day of classes on streets that were almost illusory for me.  For three years I had walked these same streets twice a day and yet now they had no influence over me.  I knew that I would return to a place that was not home- to where home had been packed away neatly and carefully into numbered boxes- to a new emptiness with shadows of the reality my brain superimposes on the vacant apartment.

My mother and sister had spent the day packing and I pictured the apartment filled with the boxes which herald the life change being made; different for each of us as we stood on a figurative precipice- the anticipation mixed with fear blossomed as if I stood in line on a rollercoaster.  Rather than face the long and boring hours of this fear, I wandered from the familiar path.  It all looked the same, even though I was leaving.  Maybe that was the most depressing part.  I knew that everything would continue as they were even after I was gone.  There is nothing like moving to convince a person of their own insignificance.

I don’t know how long I sat there, staring through the trees to the sky, reveling in my own irrelevance as the sky darkened and changed. The first raindrop fell as the sky changed from blue to mood ring purple, shifting disappearing behind the brighter orange of the clouds.  I sat still, unperturbed by the rain.  It helped me feel sorry for myself and I welcomed it.

It was in those last few days in Philadelphia that I felt any kind of connection with the city in which I had lived for three years.  Until leaving became a reality, I had hated the place with a passion.  Now the people I knew passed into the realm of nostalgia as better friends, the stores and the streets colored with the marketing of memory.  It was then that I realized- I had been happy here, and I hadn’t noticed.