Lay the Past to Rest

Almost imperceptible, like something not quite seen, the car pulls up. There is a face in the driver's seat that is familiar. Eerily so. It is a remembrance, half lost in the land of dreams. The woman, no longer a girl, sitting on a small wall stands, straightens her plain black sundress, throws an old army backpack over her right shoulder and steps towards the vehicle. Sliding into the seat she feels like she has done this a thousand times before, and yet, never. There is a brief embrace shared between the two, so platonic that it seems unfitting for two who have shared intimacies for years. Pleasantly, but without much luster, the woman asks perfunctory questions. He answers, but does not ask any of her. Giving directions in between banalities she carries the conversation, unsure why she bothers. A part of her is still standing on the receding sidewalk, while the other lies in years past. Nothing but a shell now shares the space of this metallic tomb. They move as wraiths, part of no world. It is a convergence; the landscape of her childhood and present, a place new and unknown to him, two people who's time has passed.

Too many memories in one moment. The space flashing by the outside of their ghost ship belongs to her, to thoughts of her father and mother, of life before college, of daily life and things to come. These clash with those that they hold together, from a place and time so distant that they seem not to belong to this world. Always she has loved to play the tour guide to visiting friends. But not now. Now she wants to hold the worlds apart for fear their collision might eradicate one and split her in two never to again become whole. As the day passes they exist in nothingness. And she knows now, completely, that college and the life that it held for her is over. That her life has become memories. And the to survive she must let them slip into the recesses, to be pulled out only for special occasions. They are no longer the people they were then. She is not so innocent and naive. Oh that she were. She is no longer the fantasy he had once called her. The girl who sent shivers down his spine when she walked into the room. They no longer turn in assignments to be graded.

The change is what it is. The inevitable. Her only fear is that this day, this day that signifies the end of something forever, will steal the past. Take away those happy, exciting, memories. At one point he tells her he has never seen her happier. She thinks that he does not know her at all. After all, it has been a year since last they lay eyes and hands on one another. Time had not stood so still for her as it had for him. She who had moved across the country, departing from all that there had been for her, which even then was no more. He had lived still surrounded y his friends, in the same place, her still a reality to him. But he was no more than a ghost to her.

And so, as they sat at the conclusion of their stolen say he tried to make the past the present. But she was not moved. All that she desired was the end of this forgery. Wished that he would slip back into the memory from whence he had come and stay there locked safely, forever unchanging. She told him that the door to her was closed. He took it in, and smiling sadly at her said, so it's really over then. He had not until that moment fully grasped this truth and it struck him like a dagger in the heart. I'll go then.

And so he went. Forever out of her life and into her mind, to be kept forever and for always, unchanging.