Coasting through the boulevard of memories from my old home town, I’m suddenly impressed with the urge to push my machine to the limits and careen across that old forgotten city, watching as the sights of the changes blur into a nothingness. At high speeds, the shops and signs on the side of the highway fade into the dull out-of-focus of inaccurate memory, and the entropy of time is no longer noticable.
Feeding the memories through the old 8 mm projector in my mind and playing it at high speeds creates the illusion of my own persona standing still, while all around me shuffle in fast forward towards maximum entropy.
Every time I visit there, the city has grown by leaps and bounds. With each individual frame in my mind, recorded time-lapse style every few months, you could almost watch as the city grows, buildings springing up, houses raised, streets repaired and expanded, individuals disapearing into the background as the city, a living organism, a cell on the open earth, expands and grows into a sprawling center of the controlled chaos of human life.
But of course, pressing onward at highway speeds in this godforsaken town will only get me arrested, and so the changes stand out in full regalia, an enemy’s reminder of how it feels I haven’t changed, and yet everything around me has.
Today, I discovered yet another friend of mine is getting married, and will be moving away at the end of the summer.
My friends from years past scatter like rain, and yet it feels like I’m the only constant, but probably because I’m me, and I feel like a constant only to myself.
Sad songs scream through the stereo, hurling me back into a reality like a bungee, as the needle reads 42 M.P.H. I lighten my load on the accelerator, and feel the shudder as the inner workings of some complex machine lets the gentle downward slope of yet another unnamed hill take over the momentum, and I allow my memories and my vehicle to coast, watching the slow drone of temporal existence.
A shop no longer there, a sign missing, a new dentist’s office where none stood before.
Friends gone and incommunicado, a love’s labor lost and not even the chance to say the I’m sorry’s, and the constant dramatic dance of family and friends as the clock of time clicks off the years by itself, apathetic and certain, off in the distance.
There’s the old 7-11 on the corner, still there, an oasis of consistency in a land where nothing’s the same month to month.
A few friends left, still in the area, same old conversations, some old bullshit and a chance to laugh about high-school innocence and ignorance.
The boulevard coasts on, but I pull my car in a different direction, off the beaten path and onward towards the creation of other memories, back to my new home in a different town. I have a meeting with tomorrow, and I won’t be late.
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