Turn, Turn, Turn

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave birth to it comes again.

     Nostalgia stalks me lately. It's waiting in old blog entries, in the halls I walk through, on the balcony of the building next door that I must pass every morning, on every shelf and in every box in my house. Waiting for the perfect opportunity to leap out and suffocate me with memories that can never again be wholly untainted by pain. 

     This town is haunted by ghosts of the living. The young'uns don't see the 6'3" man in a purple kilt sauntering down the hall. They don't hear the Disney songs being sung, smell the heavy cigarette smoke on the 3rd floor balcony, or feel the girl with the dragon tattoos slip up and surprise them from behind. But it's all there. Just beneath the surface, all of these people are there. As am I. I turn around some days, and I see the girl I used to be sitting under the tree, or skipping down the halls. I wonder if they know that they've left phantoms behind. I wonder what I've left behind in my old haunts.

     I was talking to my dad the other day about cycles and the ebb and flow of people in and out of our lives. It seems that I continually spiral through phases of meeting many new people, falling in love with them as people, and then watching the tribe dwindle and be pruned down until it's just me again. It's a beautiful, awful, natural, horrible cycle. But the Wheel turns.

     I think I've begun the long process of saying goodbye to this place. I've lived here longer than anywhere else now. Maybe I've stayed too long. Maybe I'll come back and stay forever. But never again in this particular phase of life. So everything takes on the poignancy of being "the last." The last fall I'll spend here, the last Syrup Sopping, the last time I'll register for classes, my last Halloween as a college student. It makes me treasure each event deeply, even while I'm chomping at the bit to move on to the next phase of life.It makes me difficult to be around some days. This place is profoundly mine, yet it no longer belongs to me. I've poured sweat, blood, and tears into this town - but I'm fading away into nothing more than a ghost. And I see the other ghosts fading as I slip away. For who will remain to remember the glory days? The long, lazy afternoons spent under the Happy Tree of the Happy People, the exploits of the Foy Table crew, Campus Climbing, the dinners in Broun Basement? And do the places that hold those memories become different places when no one sees the spectres that pervade them?

     I walked by the Tree today. There were two girls spread out under it, chit-chatting and doing homework. Making their own memories. Memories that one day they will also surrender to the usurping younger generation of students. And I was happy for them. Happy that they didn't yet know that they were becoming ghosts. Other people now haunt the nooks and crannies that I once loved so dearly. And that's the way it should be. The Wheel turns indeed.