Revisiting

A few months ago, I wrote the following draft for a post, after a series of visits to Berkeley and Oakland.

Whispering Ghosts

I spent summers age four to twenty one in a small Cape Cod town. By the time I spent my last summer there, now many years ago, the collective weight of memories made there felt stifling. I felt some mix of anger, resentment, and pain about the place in which I had, over the years, had so much fun. Maybe it's that, by that last summer, I had so far reached the bitter end of summer life there, after most of my friends had left to do other things, I was mourning the lost childhood idyll. At the time, however, it felt like the ghosts of the past were gibbering ever louder in my ears, clouding conversations with people actually present. Every place I in which I found myself was a place I had been hundreds of times before, with many different people or alone, making the air dense with personal history. I don't think I ever psychically escaped so much as I physically stopped going there.

Recently, I have noticed having similar feelings while making trips to the East Bay. I cannot pass anywhere, it seems, without remembering something, often many things, which happened there some number of years ago. A group of friends, a girlfriend or crush, a restaurant which used to be there, an academic triumph or failure. All these things come to mind and crowd out my actually being there at the time, although perhaps in a subjective sense my memories help make the place and time what it really is. These memories are not ghosts; they are I, and I will listen this time.

On subsequent visits, I tried that - the listening, that is. Suddenly, those voices whispering from behind my ears, just out of view, fell silent. Once engaged, they vanished, and I was left not alone exactly, but more fully there.