Pasts

Snow falls to the fire escape below. The rusted black bars become achromatic and plain, the complications of the cities many faces simplify if only for this moment. Edward takes a deep sip of his coffee, lets the air from his nostrils shoot downwards into the obsidian liquid below, the steam rolling upwards, fogging his glasses.

He watches as the squirrels emerge, bound across the Brooklyn rooftops in search of food, the out-of-place seagulls roaming overhead, far from their home at Brighton Beach, thinks of his childhood home which now exists only within his head.

The nostalgia for a simplicity that he knows never existed at times overwhelms him, thinks of the many days of roaming the hills around his home, the plainness, clean-lines, the innocence. Summer days and cool, foggy afternoons the regulated tempo of his younger years, he would traverse the golden grasses, the wind-swept Spanish moss hanging from the heavy branches of the oaks, the miner’s leaf lettuce patches that stretched for as far as the eye could see. The algae-covered pond, the weeping willow on its banks, the tadpoles and mosquito fish and the water bugs. The currencies of his remembered pasts abound and he exchanges them for moments of solace on cold days like these, far from home in the outer reaches of the city that never sleeps.

Someone has stopped in the middle of the street outside, the cars line up behind and frustrated drivers honk their horns with fury. The snow deadens the abrasive nature of their releases, he remembers as a young child playing with his sister on the highway that ran next to their house on a Sunday. That was before it became a major highway, still remained classified as a scenic route. Edward remembers his grandfather and father, father and son, in worn Levi jeans sitting on the alabaster fence watching them play. It was a summer day, the feint smell of tar from the hot asphalt, crisp, dry grasses, and the stillness of a mid-afternoon, the dry heat abounded. These things were etched into his memory forever and he knew that what he sought in life, more than happiness or contentment, was a return to this mythical past. He thinks of many of the mythical pasts we peg our contentedness, our senses of self-worth, our desires, our pains to and watches as the sparrows huddle against each other in the ever-increasing winter winds.

He knows that the memories he dredges up from his past are probably far different from what actually happened, that the contexts are lost, the full range of senses that accompanied each of his actions. His pasts become present through this yanking up and through time of these temporal moments that he commits. Today though, whether past or present, these moments offer condolement against the discord that erupts from the gritty, snow-covered streets of Brooklyn below and he sits, coffee in hand, as a being of remembered pasts.