coming from where i'm from: memory lane #1A

it doesn't happen every day. mostly days when the weather is warm, when the sun sets late, and there is enough emptiness in the air to carry nostalgia. you put your hand on the black belt of the escalator hand rail and find the memories sticking to the tips of your fingers. they aren't always welcome, but try as you might, you can't wipe their residue off. they become grooves in your skin, changing with the seasons, re-fashioned in the telling, stretching and folding and meshing and sagging with time.

i was in the philippines when mt. pinatubo erupted. the ozone got fucked up, temperatures fell globally: i woke up that morning to find my back yard covered in ash. i was about 8 years old, the news advised us not to go outside, they told us not to breathe in the air, and we didn't. we held our breaths as the world became an ancient urn trembling at the edge of a mantle. we had escaped the collapse of everything for the time being. but we could never know for certain.

sometimes i walk into this gray city and am astonished with how well i've adjusted. how i've timed my gait to the stoplights, how easy it is to locate the nearest coffee shop or Wachovia, how natural it has become to say no to the beggars, to step around the homeless as if they weren't there, to not shudder at the sight of a man picking food out of a public trash can to eat, or to stare straight ahead when a woman screams obscenities to herself on the corner, sweat and spit congregating on the corners of her mouth. there are blips of time during the day when i don't feel anything at all, and time is just the transition of one minute to the next, one task followed by another: right foot/left foot/right foot/left.

but i walk into this gray city sometimes, and see that morning in 1994 when the leaves turned to ash and the sky buried itself alive. i remember the stillness, the anxiety, the lungs held captive in mid-breath: the belief that a shudder may make the world fall down.