Take Me Back to Where the Hills Roll Green

One year ago today, my brother and I were traipsing around Ireland.  

We were standing over the tallest cliffs we'd ever been to, and marveling at how incredible it all looked.  A man was standing amidst the tourists, playing the flute for whoever would listen, and I felt like I was on top of the world.  I was seeing just how green the earth can be, and pinching myself to make sure it wasn't all a dream.

Today, I am suffering withdraw.  If I'm being completely honest, I've been suffering withdraw since Sunday morning, when I realized that it had been a year since I left for Ireland.  

So I hope you'll understand if I just scatter a few pictures here from what I was doing a year ago...

<3

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One Day

One day, we'll look back on this.

At the nights we spent laughing about nothing, sitting in circles on yours or mine or somebody else's dorm floor, spinning a bottle and ignoring what it told us to do; like when you flip a coin to make a decision, and it lets you know what you really wanted after all.  We'll look back at that time we dressed up for no reason and had the neighbors take our photograph - all dressed up with nowhere to go.  About the spontaneous day trips to the beach when May rolled around and it seemed like finals were suffocating us - like summer would never surface and all we needed was a day away from the text books.  About the time we found a book on how to read palms, and spent hours perfecting our "craft".  And how after that, you read the palms of every boy at every party or bar we went to, telling them how deep their love line looked.

About the times we felt like each others' families silently comforting, or speaking words that seemed like wisdom when they were asked for.  Or the night I called you, unable to make the words come out in order, and you came anyway because you know what I meant.  About the funerals we attended for one another, just a hand to hold, mourning a person we didn't know but you did.  

We'll remember the ways we met, but our memories will never be quite like the reality, and the lines will blur between separate occasions and different people.  We'll forget what those first few weeks felt like - the weeks before we had each other, and after we'd left our families behind.  We'll forget the details of the nights spent alone, only to remember the ones that came after you knocked on my door and asked me to get lunch with you.

We'll look back on the years we spent whispering about our futures, never knowing quite how different they'd be from what we dreamt. And we'll wonder: where did the time go?  When did we change our dreams to fit our reality?

When did we move out of the messy apartment with the absent landlord, and into the studio flat down the street from our new jobs?  When did we get engaged, and play maid-of-honor to one another's weddings, crying silently as we zippered the back of a gorgeous white gown, because we always knew it would be you and him.

When did we forget about the moments we first met, about the long nights that made us like family?

One day...we'll look back, and we'll wonder.
Where did the room with the white walls and the stained gray rug go?

<3

Nostalgia

I have a tendency to become nostalgic for things I haven't yet finished, always in the final hours of my time there.  

In high-school, I spent the entirety of my senior year nostalgic for the hallways and the locker and the lunch room that I had become so accustomed to.  For the friends I spent so much time with, and the notebooks we passed back and forth - a diary we shared with one another, where we wrote so many stories of our lives amidst so many random thoughts.  

On day trips to Wildwood, I spend the car ride home reminiscing about a trip that isn't quite over yet.  Remembering all the things we laughed about, and how cold the water was when we first stepped in.  

While walking around campus the other day, on my way to Starbucks and class, I became nostalgic for something else that I haven't left yet.

I became nostalgic for a tree in my school's quad that blooms every spring: first into an abundance of pink flowers and then, as spring turns to summer, to beautiful green leaves as the flowers fall to the ground around its trunk.

Despite being early December, it was 60 degrees in Pennsylvania, and I think the weather tricked my brain into thinking it was spring.  And that my tree should be blooming.

I'm entering finals week for my 5th semester at college, and reality has been catching up with me for the past few months that my time here is almost finished.

And as I walked to class that day, anticipating the day when my tree will, once again, bloom, I remembered the first time I photographed that tree.  And I tried to imagine the last time that I will, a little over a year from now.

And I became nostalgic for all the buildings I've had class in over the last couple of years.  For the elevators that never work, and for the beautiful stories behind some of our buildings.

And I knew that, if I come back in 12 years for my reunion, these buildings will still be here.  Because they have history.

Not just for me, but for the first women to study education here.  Or for the runaway slaves who used the basements beneath our classrooms to hide in.  Or for the person for whom our new library is named.

Or at least, the ghosts of these buildings will remain.  Even as they take down old buildings to replace them with newer architecture, or replace the sculpture in the center of the quad with a new one, the memories of these buildings will remain.

Just as the memory of my tree will.

<3

The Old House

Do you remember the old house?

A couple blocks down.  Abandoned, and left in the care of the state.  

We used to find our way in on warm summer nights.  Midnight and armed only with a flashlight and a camera, convinced we'd find something to scream about.  Something better than all the horror films we spent our Friday nights watching, together in your room.  

We'd push our way past the kitchen door, sealed shut with time and the burnt out fumes of a fire long since extinguished, prepared to find the worst.  Or at least hoping to.  

Like we were the horror film we so badly wanted to be scared by.

We passed it last night, on your way to take me home.

Still the same after all these years, beautiful in its old age and somehow made more so by the burnt edges we hadn't seemed to notice the last time.  

Now though, it's somehow much more terrifying - more of a place to be avoided than the adventure we once imagined it to be.

And we reminisced; all the fragmented memories we managed to piece together into one whole of our jointed youth spent walking every twist and turn of our neighborhood, memorizing the number of steps we had to take to our favorite trail.  

We reminded each other of the overturned bathtub in what used to be a bedroom, and the molded stairs we followed into the basement, where we swore we'd find proof of a ghost.  We joked about the tired bats in the attic that simply stared at as us we made our entry, as though we were a guest long since over-due to a dinner party that had ended hours ago.    

And we were shocked at the things we used to do.  At how terrified we both now are by the sight of that house we once spent our weekend nights in, that we now both now we'll never see the inside of again.  

I guess it's just one more part of our youth that we walked away from without ever realizing we were waving goodbye.

<3

Black and White Memories

Day 42

I don't know why, but lately I've been feeling incredibly nostalgic. 

Probably because I'm home, surrounded by all the memories.  In a way, it's a good kind of sad, but it makes me miss the people who aren't a part of my life anymore, who seemed so important to me just a couple of years ago.

The people I still miss - friends who I spent so much time with throughout high-school, that I just drifted away from as soon as we went to college.

How does that happen?

<3