Windows

On the far side of my room, about a foot from my heels where they dangle off the edge of my mattress, is a window. From the wide glass panes, I can see a stretch of green pouring out from my garden, my neighbor’s garden, and their neighbor’s garden. Bobbing up and down out of that green sea are the heads of two young girls on a trampoline, their dark brown hair and spontaneous laughter fading in and out of focus. I wake up to the sound, hungover from a newfound fear of being alone, not just in a new city, but a new continent. Half-awake, I conflate their unfamiliar faces with someone else’s, the way the mind does in dreams. I am ten years old, and I’m pushing and shoving my best friend on a trampoline, the same one that sits dormant in her backyard, growing rust. For a moment, the glass pane separating me from those girls becomes something temporal. But it’s ten o’clock, so I close my blinds, so as not to infect their sweaty, red-cheeked smiles. 

I stumble across another window on the streets of York Rise. A block party. There are streamers, DJs, trombones, and two-for-ten pints. The whole street is one haphazard cocktail of giggling schoolchildren, stumbling drunks, and teens trying their first few sips of over-sweetened ciders. A band plays a series of crowd-pleasers. I don’t know the words, and I am the only one. Kids weave their way through the crowd, singing and dancing along. In the corner, two girls try and fail to hula-hoop. 

This road stretches all the way from York Rise to Staten Island. The hula hoops, the mostly supervised underage drinking, the crowd of rowdy dads congregating in driveways, the mid-40s DJs. It had been a long time since I’d attended that block party, but standing there, watching the past unfold, maybe it hadn’t been so long at all. Except, this time, my role is unclear. I am not the pre-pubescent hula-hooper or the underage drinker or the buzzed parents dancing to house party classics, and the realization is as terrifying as it is freeing, though the two feelings blend into the same tightness in my chest. 

In the Archway station Aldi, the past becomes a wormhole. The same attendant from my study-abroad days helps me as I buy their second-cheapest bottle of wine. He takes a look at my license, then makes the same joke he used to make about my “fake” American ID. Except, the last time he made this joke, he knew my name. I can tell that he doesn’t remember, not anymore, as it’s been almost three years since we last spoke. It crosses my mind to tell him that we know each other. I don’t. The girl that frequented this place, that drifted aimlessly through this city, is not me. I see her reflection in the glass panes, but she is no more than a refraction of light. 

Everywhere, there is an ebb and flow of something old intermingling with the new. I submerge myself in darkened theaters to see the same movie I’ve watched hundreds of times before on a couch that is thousands of miles away. I catch up with familiar faces in unfamiliar pubs. I enter a four-story bookshop and, among the legions of titles, emerge with the same one I read every summer on hot, lazy days. Sometimes nostalgia hurts more than it comforts. 

Seismically, the boundaries of familiarity begin to shift. What was once new sinks beneath the surface of the old and familiar. The barista in my local tea shop who knows my name. The Bengal cat that greets me from my balcony. The tortoise wandering the garden behind my favorite pub. Watch out, he bites. These facets of life become a singular symbol of here-and-now, not a reminder of faded, sun-bleached memories. In time, these windows will cease to be portals into another continent, another feeling. They will be no more than what they are: a portrait of the present. Or when conversation gets quiet, I can stare past the stuffy, air conditionless pub, out the open window, and recall.