This is natural-- after all, I am a different person now than I was when I ate breakfast this morning—- but still, the scale is different. I’ll be home in a month and it’s strange to imagine that everything there will be, more or less, exactly as I left it. It will be good though. I miss home. It took me this long to realize, feel, or say that.
As for how I am different, I’m not exactly sure. I’m older, I know that much—- and better, too, I think. I have a better sense of who I am and what I want from life and I’m not sure why traveling for half a year helped me to figure that out, but it did.
I was leaving the subway earlier today, riding an escalator out of the subterranean gloom into the bright, early morning light, when I smelled banana block sunscreen. I couldn’t figure out where it came from; there was nobody near me. Still, I smelled it, and it took me back to when I was a kid and I would go with my family to Hilton Head every summer for vacation (crammed into the Volvo station wagon with the boogie boards lashed down against the roof for the interminable drive) and my parents would smother me in banana block so I could spend all day running around the tide pools with my little net trying to catch minnows [to then release] without getting sunburned.
I have this image of myself, I don’t know if it’s real or if I've picked it up from a photo since then-- I'm small and my brown hair is choppy against my forehead and I'm beaming into the camera with a gap between my two front teeth that won’t be fixed by braces for seven or eight years to come. And I don’t know what it is, the eyes I think, but I know I’m in there. I’m still thin—it’s before my chubby stage—and I’m wearing a plain red bathing suit. A silver cross that my grandfather had engraved with my initials and gave to me for my first communion hangs around my neck. Whenever I was nervous or bored I would put the cross in my mouth and bite down on it. It tasted how you would imagine it to taste, but it comforted me. I don’t know what has happened to it since then.
Anyways, after I smelled the banana block that whole picture came back, all of it, and it was strange to think about my childhood—- because that’s what it is now, my childhood. And it’s strange because to call it that implies distance, and the distance means that I am no longer there: I guess I’m not a kid anymore. Things were very different then. As kids we have so little perspective that everything simply is, in and of itself. I don’t think I could look at things that way anymore even if I wanted to (and sometimes I do). There’s too much other stuff that gets in the way-- like experience and manners and paradigms and worry and regret and hope, not to mention an expanded self-consciousness.
But then it was a clean slate. I remember how when we would walk down to the ocean my bare feet would burn against the concrete sidewalk and I would try to spot the little green lizards that would dart around the mulched gardens on the sides. I remember the night I was walking on the beach with my father and we saw the nest of baby turtles that had just hatched and were crawling impossibly slow down towards the white foam of the waves into which they would finally disappear. I remember the time my sister shut the hotel door on my thumb and the nail came off and how looking at my thumb without the nail made it hurt even more. But memory is a funny thing, because I don’t think any of those mental pictures were from the same vacation but somehow, in my brain, they’re all filed away in the same folder which has a picture of me in a red bathing suit on the cover.
So, I wonder, what will I think of that semester in college I spent in Spain? What picture will I see when I remember myself then (that is, to say, now)? There are the places I've been, and the friends I have, and there is definitely a girl involved. There’s the dinner with my host family that dissolved into us trying to catch grapes in our mouths and there’s the guy who sits outside that café on the corner, perennially smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer while he reads his book. There’s that one time when mostly sober I tried to see how high I could kick and fell on my ass. There's the subway I take and the streets I run and my Thursday beer after class with a plate of olives that make me feel sick after I eat too many. There are the beggars I recognize and there's just the right way to jiggle the key to open my lock and there are the thousand other little things that are meaningless in and of themselves. So what’s the cover of the folder? What's the picture of myself-- what will I be wearing and who will I be and will I be able to recognize a part of myself then in the eyes of who I am now? Maybe it’s a kid, no an adult, no a kid, looking into a mirror, trying to figure that question out.
