Now you’re not around this old town
I woke up that morning and had an impulsive urge to get on the train with my daughter. She’d been studying history all week, hearing tales of the revolution, and it seemed to excite her. I couldn’t drive back then, I still didn’t have my life together, but I knew we could hop a train and be in the city in three hours.
We sat at our table eating train food and me drinking train coffee. She watched YouTube on my phone and I watched the countryside whizz past outside. I used to live in this city. I moved here impulsively. I remember being drunk on a friend’s sofa at 3a.m. and thinking, “tomorrow I’m going to pack my bags and leave.”
It’s all changed now of course. The city has a light rail that dances through the gridlocked traffic. It smells better here than it used to. The streets are cleaner, although many of the storefronts are now spaces for selling phone covers and CBD vapes.
My plan is to rely on memory and confidently show her around the city like I am a native here. And why shouldn’t I? I lived here for two years.
But as I navigate the streets, I realize that the map in my head is no good, because it’s a map of the city at night. It’s a map of places to get drunk, to meet people, to make out, to walk home alone. Places to forget.
So I download an app and we find the historic places. There’s an old building where the rebels barricaded themselves against the king’s army. You can still see the bullet holes in the walls. I stick my finger in one and encourage my kid to do the same. She shakes her head, disgusted, and she grimaces at me like I’m touching a corpse.
I’m amazed at how deep my finger goes. I wonder if the bullet is still in there.
We walk around some more and check out a museum, but she’s a little bored now. I do too, but we’re stuck here until the next train home.
So we walk around. I follow my memory and see where it takes us. Nowhere, of course — or at least nowhere that will entertain a child on a grey Wednesday afternoon.
And I’m trying not to think of you, but you’ve haunted every corner of this city. Which is strange, because you’ve never even been here, except that one time we came up for a weekend and stayed with my uncle. I moved here to get away from you. I moved here hoping to forget you. But I carried you with me on every drunken night. This is the corner where I smoked a cigarette and cried. This is the bar where I talked to a pretty girl about you until she got bored and left. This is the bridge I considered jumping from, in case the waters might help me forget.
We end up in a McDonald’s. I make jokes about how historic this McDonald’s is. My kid joins in, ad-libbing a story about rebels having a McFlurry before they start the revolution. We kill time until it’s time for our train to leave, and then we leave. I take away my tray. A few moments later, a girl in a grey and yellow uniform will come to our vacated table. She’ll spray the surface and wipe it down in a single, flowing motion. All trace of us will be gone. It’s like we were never there.
