The Past Is Another Country

 

So, I want to travel there. 

I need a temporal agency.

I need a route planner to my best and worst bits, an itinerary of three-dimensional autobiography.

Time to go.

I get the number 17 bus to Cockfosters and down the road to my Nan’s house. I can see a four year old dressed in curtain robes and sugar glass jewels, the Duchess of Southgate Hill. I hear a tone of knowing in my Nan’s laughter, as she stores this memory for recall in my teenage years, and quite another conversation.

I walk down a sandy-banked lane to my first day at school. I’m dashing in through the gates, excited to be entering a world of faces, games, glue and glitter. I see my mother smiling. Until I’m gone. And then her face is suddenly bereft and broken, a look she still carries today as I say, ‘Goodbye’ after another of my short visits with long gaps.

I take a National Express coach trip  to Fresher’s Week, all confidence and flesh. Middle age and gravity have left little of that certainty intact. I’m in awe of my own beauty, and blush.

I take a long, unfamiliar ramble in Lucerne to my father’s funeral. I watch myself eulogising and trying not to shake. I weep now for what I withheld, not just then but for years to come, and feel oddly proud.

I hire a bike to my first day at work. Anxiety and confidence strangely blended. I smile at my pompous attempts to be a professional and trip myself up in the corridor.

I jump on a train bound for Blackpool and that lunchtime with my first love. The shock of his face steals my breath, his smile pornography for the soul.   I linger, intoxicated, for a few moments desperate to forget the force of his rejection that follows this act....shortly....nearer....

I flounder and stumble into the recent past. Is this me? Is any one of the things I have seen any more me than this?   Than now? 

The past is another country, and I make no more sense to myself than Scotland does to Lichtenstein.

 

March 2008

Reviews

[Dan Bullock]

Initially I wasn't sure but then it did drag me in a little, especially your Father's funeral and your first love that really untangled the web of words. I'm interested by people's changes in time because I look back and already at 27 see so many different places where I existed but I truely wondering if that was ever actually me at that point. Thoughtful writing, thanks for sharing.