Standing in the emptiness of a place you know well well-populated is a spiritual experience. I felt it first in a parking lot. A long movie, taking us into the first hour of morning, and as I walked under the streetlights, I felt it. No cars in a place that was always packed with cars. No people in a place always packed with people.
I was in my middle school long after middle school was done for me, dragged to a terrible performance of a musical sung by the breaking voices of boys becoming men. I searched out the bathroom—I knew the way so well—but it was strange to me to be so tall in a place where I once was small. Nameless ghosts were there, fears and hopes and desires I could not recall, alien, except that I knew I’d known them. Without the faces and voices and hatreds and abject misery of childhood, I could not comprehend what I knew, what I felt. I had to run.
One feels as though he’s a ghost, a phantom, without the careless world to ignore him. Ah, let me daydream, let me escape you people. But silence then becomes more devastating than the shouts and jeers. There is an echo, not just to sounds, but to your own thoughts in such places; an echo eerily like another. That which is assumed, forgotten, only half-remembered, makes itself known again.
How can one be merciful to a memory? How can one forgive what he has worked so hard to forget?
Tale Told 