constellations #95: seeing ghosts

Hi again.

Last week I drove on Rock Creek Parkway in Washington D.C., from where it starts behind the Lincoln Memorial to where it ends up near Beach Drive. It was late and dark and there weren’t a lot of other cars on the road. I had arrived in the District seven hours before this moment and would head back to Brooklyn fourteen hours later. I had already been in the car, collectively, for five or six hours that day. I was tired. Maybe that’s why, rounding a corner heading north, the Potomac on my left, I started tearing up. 

When I was in my early twenties I used to run on that road all the time. I was in grad school; my time was more or less my own; I lived a couple miles away, and they were good miles to run: south from Dupont to Foggy Bottom—right past the hospital where one of my oldest and dearest friends worked, in fact—and down towards the National Mall, then along the river, then up through Georgetown and then back home. I trained for a couple races but mostly I just ran for the fun of it, to work through stress or clear my head or get out of the house. And I went there because it was beautiful and scenic, sure, and also because it was there, and it was where I went.

I felt at that time, like I so often do, like I was in-between epochs of my life, like a door had closed behind me and I was looking around anxiously for another one to open. Like I was treading water. Like I was going nowhere, and was too old to get away with it. But of course I know now that I was exactly where I needed to be: going to shows several nights a week; getting drunk at divey bars with my friends and figuring out what kinds of people we wanted to be; enrolling only in courses that interested me, though they never seemed, from my vantage, to add up to an academic career. I never ran at night but still, driving on the parkway last week, I swear I saw my ghost, clear as day, grinning to herself and scowling at tourists, headphones blaring Jimmy Eat World and Bury Me At Makeout Creek.

I read an essay last week where a writer admitted she feels driven by a simple, persistent question: How can I get it back? “Sometimes,” she writes, “this question feels like the animating force behind my emotional life—where did it go and how can I retrieve it?” Of course, “no one knows what it is,” she writes, “least of all me.” And I don’t know either. But I do know what she means. It’s a feeling I often get when I visit DC, the city where I spent most of my twenties. It makes me think of this funny tweet I’ve had bookmarked for years: “I hate it when, due to the fleeting nature of human life, I subconsciously mourn my passing youth by assigning a mistaken sense of deep authenticity and significance to a place in which I was simply 24 years old.” (Obviously, the city itself is filled with “deep authenticity and significance,” whatever that means, wholly outside of whatever I assign it—but still, whenever I visit, I’m always passing little slices of sidewalk or since-shuttered bars or old apartments and thinking, ah yes—remember when?)

Or just the other day in Brooklyn, when a scene from years ago flashed before me. I had come up to Brooklyn from DC to visit a friend, and we ventured together to another friend’s party. I hardly knew the city at that time and so I let my friend lead the way, and later, whenever I tried to recall the night, all I remembered was small, scattered details: that my friend and I had taken the bus, and the apartment we visited was across the street from a park, and there was a bodega on the corner—facts which narrowed the location down not at all. So the whole evening kind of faded into the recesses of my mind. But then the other day I was in the car with some friends in Bushwick and someone said, all of a sudden, Oh, didn’t so-and-so used to live here? And he was right—that party had taken place right around the corner. And then I remembered the night perfectly: the awkward shuffle of taking our shoes off upon entering, the boys playing video games in the living room, the recycling can overflowing. We were so young and Brooklyn had felt so endless to me then; I felt such a tenderness for the person I once was.

Anyway, I don’t even think I was crying on the parkway in DC because I wanted it back. I think really what I was feeling was just gratitude to have known that version of myself and for the fact that I could still feel her in me. Lately I’ve been so fixated on my relationship to futurity—how, when I try to picture myself in the future, I can’t seem to see anything through the static; it can be hard to imagine whether genuine joy or fulfillment might be possible for me in five or fifty years. I suppose that is why I am so romanced by nostalgia: it lets me see my circumstances as comprehensible and narrativized, lets me see myself as blameless and the future as assured. Driving that night in DC, I thought about how often I sweetly recall my past selves like this, and briefly had a vision of my future as a time when I might recall this moment—getting all emotional in the car, once again dealing with the closed doors and the treading water, etc.—and feel gratitude for knowing this version of myself. Even if there are no guarantees, I felt a little hopefulness communing with the future like that: seeing myself seeing myself as a ghost, and wishing her well.

Here are some other things I have been consuming lately: This Is Lorelei’s Box for Buddy, Box for Star, which I reviewed for Pitchfork; the lovely new book Traveling: On The Path of Joni Mitchell by my hero & yours, Ann Powers; this story about the opioid epidemic’s impact on New England fishing boats; this essay in The New Republic about fatphobia and American novels; the daily word game MishMash, which my friend’s friend created; a camping trip to Fire Island; karaoke with my friend Claudia, where we did a stunning rendition of “Shut Up Kiss Me”; a very nice meal of Creste di Gallo-shaped pasta and Aperol Spritzes with friends at Pasta Louise; band practice with my Carly Rae Jepsen cover band, which you — yes, you! — can see live if you are in Washington, D.C., on August 23; what my friend called “a perfect city summer day” (the kind where you leave your house in the early afternoon and don’t return until late at night after having gone to no fewer than four different social engagements and survived three different micro-climates); and finally, a bunch of podcasts, since I’ve been driving a lot:

• this episode of Sixteenth Minute of Fame about that viral video of the Boston cop going down a children’s slide

• the first few episodes of this series about The Big Dig

• the layoff series from Proxy, the new show from ex-Invisibilia host Yowei Shaw

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This time last year I was: also feeling nostalgic, I guess; and before that, learning new words, contemplating hibernation, & being a late bloomer.

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Thanks for reading. I’d love to hear about the places to which you’ve assigned deep authenticity and significance, aka the sites of your 24-year-old-ness! Until then, hope the ghosts you see this month help you believe in the future, too.

xo,
M