(NB: Everything posted under these four “The search for time lost” posts was composed in real time as noted.)
Fifteen years ago I walked through the malls looking at things I wanted to need and couldn’t afford. Now I don’t even recognize them. No more music stores or bookstores, and I don’t feel like I need every piece of Vandy merchandise on offer. Whatever it was I used to find here, it’s not there anymore.
So many things are just not there anymore. The Rand bookstore, the lockers in the bottom of the student center, the Overcup is different, my old apartment is gone completely. Tower Records, Bookstar, Davis-Kidd. The Boston Market where Vaughn and I would eat before seminar. The intersection where I got T-boned is a 4 way stoplight now.
And yet…the colors are still black and gold, the nets are still at the ends of the basketball court, and tacos on the patio at SATCO are still the best thing ever. It’s okay there’s so much changed. I’ve changed so much. The school is like me – the forms are still there, the fundamentals are still there, but in so many ways I’m not the same person who left here and this isn’t the place I left. And maybe in the end that’s what matters. I recognize that I’m still the same person, and learn to live with the person I’ve become. And if that’s what I get out of this trip, it was a hell of a good trip.
It’s good that I didn’t – that I couldn’t – keep coming back. It forced me to regenerate fast in DC, to stop trying to be who I was and become who I had to be. If I had kept coming back and seeing the old places just the same, it would have been that much harder for me to go on to the next stage. Instead, I see that it’s as different as I am, but the same, and in a way that makes it easier to accept and validate that I was here and what I did still counts.