Wednesday, September 1, 2010
Bisbee, My Love.
Coming back into Bisbee, Arizona feels like it does when I pass through Iowa City, where I went to college, or past an apartment on the west-ish side of Chicago where I lived when I first got to the city, raw and young and wrapped up in various compulsions. Nostalgia slaps me upside the head and memories wash over my brain and between the beatings and the floods, you can’t blame me for being exhausted by the past very quickly.
The streets of the little town are exactly how I left them. The Copper Queen Library hasn’t moved an inch in any direction. The coffee shop on the corner was my haunt during the morning hours and since it’s night now I see no one I knew, but the wicker chairs and the pastry cases are still holding court. It’s only been six months but it feels like I was here in another life, hanging out with another girl who looked like me.
And I’m never sure if my reaction to places I used to live is just standard issue wist* or if there’s something wrong with me. Do other people visit places they were and no longer are and feel such crippling longing? And what are we longing for, exactly? Because that part makes no sense. I don’t want to go back to last winter. I don’t want to live here. I want to take my husband out of his nearby base and go on with the next part, so why do I look around the streets of Bisbee and want to put my head down on the dashboard for awhile?
Maybe it’s just Proust. Maybe it’s just me, in search of lost time.
