On moving (again)
Narrating, time, and place
Two years ago, I moved from Indiana to Ohio. During the first week of orientation, I talked with a friend on the phone as I walked from campus back to my apartment. I wasn’t sorry that I’d moved; I didn’t regret anything, but even so, I felt, acutely, the friendships I’d left behind in South Bend.
“I think I’m going to be very lonely here,” I told him.
Funny words. I’ve been many things here, but lonely would be one of the last descriptions I’d choose.
I should have known better to judge so soon. The friend I was speaking to could have told me as much. We’d met five years before, on the Camino de Santiago, a long pilgrimage winding from southern France through the north of Spain. We’d been complete strangers at the time, happening into conversation at the foot of the mountains after mass on the first day of our travels. A common occurrence on the Camino, befriending fellow travelers, something I’d been told to expect when I’d embarked on the journey, but I’d been skeptical. I was sure this was the story of sociable pilgrims, the kind looking to befriend everyone they crossed paths with—not, say, a person who had packed multiple books, was terrible at small talk, and planned to keep to herself for 500 miles. I’d gone on the Camino alone, anticipating a month of solitary walking and contemplation.
But I was proven wrong. First on the Camino, where repeated encounters with the same people day after day gradually accumulated into friendships with the kind of silliness and depth that normally takes far longer to develop. And then in Bowling Green, where I’ve found a community of writers within the program, as well as a community outside of it—at the brewery where I worked for a little over a year and in the small city itself, where I recognize people and feel myself being recognized places around town as well.
I will miss this. I am missing it, already. I am sitting outside Grounds for Thought, the coffee shop that is also a used bookstore, the one where I recognize all the baristas and some of them know my name, where half the time I run into one or more people I know. Later today, I will go for a walk with one of my classmates by the Maumee River, a place I have been several times but that will be new to her. In the evening, Main Street will be shut down for a summer festival, and we will walk around, getting fair food and drinks. We will stop in at the brewery, and I will say goodbye for what feels like the thousandth time. In the morning, I will wake early to grab coffee with my classmates one last time. And then I will drive back through the states I’ve driven through before—Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Minnesota—which is not quite the way I drove to get here, but will feel like a tracing back through time nonetheless.
Leaving will be long and drawn out and far too quick.
Not unlike the end of the Camino—when we got close to Santiago, we wanted to get there and we didn’t. We wanted to move faster and we wanted to slow down.
I think the impulse with impending memory works this way, often: trying to pause and trying to move. The static and the dynamic. We want photographs that hold things in place; we want objects that will serve as mementos of a time, that will somehow contain it. But narrative wants to move—we want, not the still photograph, but the scene that breaks out of it; not the object, but whatever day that unspools from inside it. We want what cannot be, which is, for sameness and difference to exist at once. Narrative is predicated on change, big or small—even in the course of a single evening, we can feel time slipping like this, one moment to the next, each beat replaced by the one that follows.
In my last days in Bowling Green, I find myself with competing desires. I want the current moment and I want the next one too.
The closest I come to meeting this desire is when I run.
And, in a kind of strange grace, I have been able to run more lately. The weather has settled a bit and my head has been good, so I’ve been tracing the neighborhoods and remembering that this is, yes, what I always feel the need to do when I leave a place. To run through it. As though my feet and my body might be able to memorize it. As though the act of running might summon up all the times I’ve passed over these parts before.
Each time I leave a place, I think it’s the first time I feel this way. But it’s not. When I left Portland, at 24, I did the same. I wrote this:
You run through north Portland the day before you will leave it to return to the Midwest. You head through the neighborhood, slowing your stride beside the farmer’s market to see fresh peaches piled high beside a stall of leafy greens and a pod of food carts. You pass by the coffee shops and little restaurants until the road curves to the St. Johns Bridge arching over the river.
When I left South Bend, at 32, I ran along the St. Joseph River. I ran around the two lakes on Notre Dame’s campus. When I return home, or visit my grandparents, I want to seek out old places to run—the Stone Arch Bridge over the Missisippi by my old high school. The road that leads down from my grandparents’ house to the sea, a route I can trace back up to the church cemetery where my uncle is buried.
Running, to me, is memory. There’s a layering on of the past and the present, the current moment that you are physically inside and all of the previous times you’ve passed over this same stretch of sidewalk or road.
My last closing shift at the brewery, I requested to mop, one of two closing tasks, usually the least desirable one because it takes longer than cleaning the bathrooms. I thought I wanted to do it because it is the one I do the most often, but I realized, as I was working my way through the brewery floor, that it is also a task of layered memory. Like running, it is a physical action that shifts my internal narrative of time.
I love narratives that play with time. The “Time Passes” section in To the Lighthouse. The jumps between generations in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The slippery nature of time in Anita Brookner’s Family and Friends, as the narrator examines old photographs.
I’m forgetting, perhaps, some better examples here, but these are the ones that come to mind, because of the way in which time feels when you read them. Full of gaps and elisions and repetitions across years. Time can be unrelenting—moving forward with a bracing quickness in “Time Passes,” as the characters age and die, as the house deteriorates—but it can also feel gentle, leisurely, as it does in the dinner scene earlier in To the Lighthouse, and in the way the house later retains the memory of the family even as it falls into disuse. Part of the emotional experience of reading these novels is that time does not act in one way, and because of this, it opens up the desires of the characters—often a longing to hold on to the past and a wish to somehow bring it into the future.
I am reminded, in these weeks and days before moving, of what a repeated action in a contained space or a set route does to time. How you can somehow be both moving and still at once—because it feels, when all of those times have been ushered in together, as though time stands still for just a beat. It passes, of course; you move through it. But there’s an odd feeling, for a moment, of being inside memory.