Sometimes my past haunts me – in a sort of eerie yet compelling way. I have a desire to shut my eyes, burry myself under my duvet, and travel back. I wake up in my childhood room. When I pull back the covers, I’m struck by a warm ray of sunlight. I glance out the windows at the rhododendron trees and small garden. The chrysanthemums are a dark orange, highlighted by bright spring forsythia. I’m alive, no longer in the cramped darkness, instead I am free. I’m no longer glued to the ground by my decisions. Instead there is a future in front of me, one that is blank and a bit easier to craft.
This is not a desire, as it might seem, to change the path of my life. It’s just a wish to immerse myself in a simpler moment. For a moment, I want to feel the calm of an adolescence that I once considered tumultuous. There was much I did not know. In that moment, ignorance was wonder.
Today I’m sitting in an overcast Manhattan park, glancing out at the cloudy skyline. It’s not the lush woodland that I grew up with. It is beautiful in its own way. I know that I’m looking back on the past with rose colored lenses. Nothing was perfect, not even then. Past Alice had her own moments of despair and her own challenges.
So I’ll pack that up for a while. I’ll put the memories in a box and let dust cover it, like soft snow. I will look forward to my dog’s tail wagging in jubilation when I walk through the door. I’ll show up for the first day of my new term in school. I’ll hug my husband when he comes home from work.
One reason that I love looking up at the Manhattan skyline, is that the whole city seems small. In reality it is small, just a cluster of buildings in a much larger universe. This is the universe that I live in. I’m sitting here, with the past behind me, and I know that I’m where I need to be.