The last moments of childhood
A few stanzas about the endurance of our past lives.
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is Celine Song’s Past Lives, which follows the lingering affection of childhood friends Na Young/Nora and Hae Sung, who part at age 12 but never loosen their hold on one another.
A quiet bar scene in which they reunite as adults in New York is a bit of onscreen poetry. The characters try to make sense of their impossible connection in the broad sweep of each other’s lives, to reconcile how something could be both essential and ephemeral.
How do you belong to something you no longer have?
I’ve long asked this question about the place where I grew up. On the one hand, you could shake me like a kitchen rug and never knock me free of my hometown, a 3.5 square-mile enclave where families settled down and mostly stayed put. The building in that photo above was demolished in 2002, but I can still walk on the basement’s checkerboard flooring in my memory, conjure the old-book smell in the library, and picture Mrs. Deacon and her Dorothy Hamill haircut, perched on a stool, holding a Styrofoam coffee cup in kindergarten.
I still exchange holiday cards with my 5th grade teacher. And although I never had a byline at Sports Illustrated, I imagine I was the only reporter there ever to receive a flower delivery from the woman who once gave her weekly spelling tests.
All of this, and all of my memories, and all of the affection I have for St. Albans—including the extended family members who still live there—should be enough to feel proprietary about the place, to feel I still belong to it, and it to me.
And yet.
Sometimes, my claim on it has felt weak.
My parents moved to North Carolina when I was 16, a decision that reduced me to a blubbering puddle so deep and so wide it threatened to drown them both. And so I wound up back in West Virginia. I spent the remaining years of high school shuffling between my beloved aunt’s home in St. Albans and my parents’ new place on the outskirts of Raleigh—the school year at the former, summers and holidays at the latter six hours away.
I was fortunate to have that option. It shaped me in important ways.
And yet.
I had two homes—an abundance of homes—and somehow no home at all.
While many of my friends also left for college after graduation—just as I left for UNC-Chapel Hill—when they returned in the summer or for winter break, they really returned home. They’d pass that red brick building as they drove into town, pass our high school, pass our junior high (also now demolished). Meanwhile, I’d pass a law firm, a Hardee’s, and an orange-trimmed storage rental on Highway 64 east of Raleigh.
Perhaps my childhood friends would gather to play football in the snow on the old playground where Mark H. broke his arm in 4th grade. They’d settle back into each other’s lives for a few weeks. They’d see each other in the flesh. I would see them only in photos.
My classmates learned how to leave and how to come home, to reconcile who they were becoming with who they had been. I’d learned only how to leave—or so it felt for many years.
So I told myself.
So I believed until a narrative poetry class last spring—and the prompt, “Write about a moment from high school”—shook my ancient thinking loose.
I’m sharing those verses below, a version of which were published in an anthology called Good Old Days last year.
Unlike the Past Lives characters Na Young/Nora and Hae Sung, I didn’t have a romantic connection with Mr. Popularity, whom you’ll meet in my poem. (Although all of us had a crush on him at some point growing up.) We are connected instead by 3.5 square miles of land, four blocks of shared sidewalk, our first day of kindergarten, and the knowledge that we knew each other when. We are connected by the moment described in the poem.
“The Na Young you remember doesn’t exist here,” Nora tells Hae Sung in that second film clip I linked to above. “But … that little girl did exist. She’s not sitting here in front of you, but it doesn’t mean she’s not real. Twenty years ago, I left her behind with you.”
A beautiful thought about the endurance of belonging. I hope we all endeavor to hold onto what matters, and to what we’ve been given, and to each other’s inherent humanity—especially that of the many vulnerable people among us who are facing true unbelonging and crisis after a dizzying two weeks in this country.
One last thing: If you’re anything like me, the football photo at the beginning of this post may have called to mind a scene from the movie Miracle. Either way, you might enjoy watching the clip of it below. It’s one of my favorites. Caution: It may make you feel things.
And here’s the poem—which was the first one I’d written, fittingly enough, since high school. (If you’re reading on a phone, the formatting is likely to look a little screwy, unfortunately):
At the senior after-party The Breakfast Club is on the screen as Mr. Popularity leaves his pack, leaves Molly and Emilio, leaves Becky and Laura and John and Jason, leaves his front-row-center throne and begins to hurdle the crimson seatbacks in reverse, Nikes swooshing into classmate after classmate as he steadies a hand on Lisa’s Aqua-netted hair— still molded in the shape of a mortarboard cap—eliciting “ouch!” after “hey!” after “c’mon, dude!” leaping row after row, coming to me in the back of the auditorium where I sit alone thinking about the end. He is thinking about the beginning. He is thinking about how he took the long way home from school so we could walk together in 2nd grade and 3rd and 4th and 5th and so on, side by side from Washington to Kanawha to Monmouth until he left me at the corner of Trenton and kept going, until he picked up track and football and I put down my pom-poms, until we grew apart but stayed close the way you do in small towns. He tells me he misses all those walks home already misses our story, already misses growing up together. His forever-goodbye knotted with an always-hello the way they are in small towns. He will stay and marry the head cheerleader and Shy Girl, finally fleet-footed, will leave and leave and leave, will keep going, will forget the crush but remember the beginning, their lispy kindergarten hello, an abacus in the corner, rows of beads to mark the slide of time.
Thanks for reading, as always. I’m so appreciative—and wish you all well. ♣
I love the poem (and Miracle reference)!