"This street is where it all happened, not much now. Why do we always expect home to stay the same? Nothing else does. It's funny how when you're a kid a day can last forever. Now, all these years seem just like a blank." --- Bobby in Hearts in Atlantis
I took that ride today, back to the street and house where I grew up. I parked my car and walked up the same driveway I had walked up thousands of times so many years ago. I climbed the three front porch steps and I peeked in through the glass front door, but the interior was barely visible: all dark and muted. It was a different house, not my house. I rang the bell and nobody answered. I gathered nobody was home because the mailbox was still stuffed and full.
So, I turned around and walked down the three front porch steps and then turned around and looked back. It was almost dusk and chilly under a cloudy grey sky, and the wind rustled some long tall plants in front of the living room's bay window. They swayed back and forth, back and forth. I was overwhelmed with great and almost unbearable sadness. Nobody was home and nobody would ever be back home there for me. The street was bleak, depressing, and almost unrecognizable.... the houses seemed forlorn and like shadows of their former selves.
I used to live there as a kid but going back today was personally like visiting a cemetery. There was so much emptiness, such a great feeling of loss. The wind kept rustling the front shrubbery, rustling the shrubbery and I stood all alone on that sidewalk and for a minute it felt like nobody even lived on that street. Everybody was gone. The street was a gloomy ghost town.
I got back into my car and drove away, consumed with strange heavy emotions. And as Bobby said: "I lived on that street during the last of of my childhood." I will always think of that street. Always. I knew I would never go back there again... but as the view of that street disappeared in the rear view mirror, I remembered the time so many years ago when I drove away from that street into my future.
