Dredging Up The Past
a piece of autofiction
Most of my conversations with Alice inevitably end up in a rehashing of the past, of which she remembers very little, so to her, my accounts are like discovering a foreign land, while to me, even though I bring us back there often enough myself, they feel more akin to visiting the same ugly, abandoned junkyard over and over.
I tell her that Rory has texted me recently. Rory is a girl I was friends with as a child. She wrote that I seem to be doing good and that while she doesn‘t know how I feel about her nowadays, she’d love to catch up sometime.
To be honest, by the time we graduated, there didn‘t seem to be enough of the Rory I’d known left to have feelings about.
A lot of the people we went to school with seemed to be kind of out of it by the end. And really, who could blame them?
There is also always the guilt, the knowledge that child-me was a shit friend. I describe it to Alice like this:
„I was a fucking bulldozer, dude.”
„But you‘ve got some soft skills now.“
Yah, NOW.
The truth is that even if I never see any of these people again, we‘ll be running through each other‘s lives like veins through a body.
Because no one else will ever know what it was like to grow up in this city in the time we did. And maybe that doesn‘t mean much in the grand scheme of the world, but it does to me.
I wonder if we would be able to recognize it in each other, if we met elsewhere, as strangers. That certain blankness in our stares.
If you ask me, this is a place to raise monsters and voids, not kids.
Every time I see a teenage girl on the street here, I want to shake her by the shoulders, shake the blankness out of her eyes.
And fucking yet, this is where we grew up. There is some sense of ownership and pride in that.
It‘s beautiful at night and it feels safer than anywhere else.
That’s why, I want to shake it by the shoulders, and, like Isaac1, say,
„You were my city. So why couldn‘t you be my city.“
I wander it aimlessly, up and down.
Then I call Jonah because he is the only one I want to talk to when I get like this.
We spend the first two minutes of the phone call bickering about things like the fact that we have only been bickering for one minute, not two. I offer to help him move boxes next week because fuck knows when we’ll see each other again once my semester break is over. Then I tell him that multiple people who I haven’t talked to in years have recently reached out to me. He says maybe it’s just the first time all of us were able to catch a break and think about these things.
It feels unfair that there are people out there who knew me when I wasn’t fully a person yet. That shouldn’t be allowed. I don’t want there to be a narrative of my bulldozer years, especially not one I can’t control.
We hang up and I walk home. Even though I tell everybody everything, there are only a few people like him, people I let myself be fully known by. I guess that’s because they have to let it happen as well.
It feels good to not have to explain myself, to have my hands - stretched out in exasperation over the inability to find words - met with a silent nod, to receive what I need because they know I need it.
It feels good to be seethrough, to know that I have given my ugly over and that it was received. What a fucking privilege.
For the most part, I don‘t remember the past. Or I at least don‘t make it a part of me.
It‘s not healthy but I can‘t help it, it‘s how I keep my brain from eating itself.
The people who died are dead and nothing I dredge up and write down can make them not dead. These types of things.
Maybe if I wrote about them, it would be beautiful and raw and people would cry if they read it but none of those things would make me feel better. Vulnerability for vulnerability‘s sake is asinine.
I especially avoid the ages 0-8 because I think I was just happy then. It‘s better to live with whatever pain I have now day to day than mourn for the time when I didn‘t have any.
I have this recurring fantasy of having a tell-all documentary made, where all my friends sit down and talk about me in candid, well-lit interviews, with beautiful and slightly too-stylized rooms behind them.
There is a lot of shit I don’t talk about or only privately, so the fantasy of others doing it for me is oddly liberating.
More importantly, though, I have just always loved being told about myself. Receiving reports of how people perceive me.
My own sense of identity is so fleeting, especially when I spend too much time online. It’s been a firm belief of mine for a while now that we only exist because we are perceived. If a tree has a mental breakdown in the woods but nobody sees it, then who the fuck cares.
A good chunk of it might just be an overinflated ego and craving for attention and validation, though.
I imagine Jonah would be talking about all the times I‘ve called him crying and how after every first date I go on, I conjure up a crisis (especially if it goes well!!) that he needs to talk me out of again. Then, before he can move on to the next thing, he might get attacked by his enormous stack of books.
Alice would be seated in front of her piano, recollecting fragments of my bulldozer years (evil!!!). But I‘d rather have her do it than anyone else.
Then it would get interesting. Maybe they‘d invite people I‘m not friends with anymore.
I have this visual in my head of us having a rumored public feud, so I‘d get to say incredibly gracious and only slightly backhanded things like: „We have a complicated personal history but I wish them nothing but the best, professionally.“
Eventually, they‘d be bringing out people I haven‘t talked to in decades. Who‘d tell stories about me that I can‘t even remember, painting me in all kinds of unpredictable lights. That part is terrifying.
The film would end with a nice picture of me and a not-too-cheesy acoustic guitar song playing in the background.
I go to a funeral and stop thinking about myself for the first time in a while. It doesn’t last very long. So I focus very hard on trying to not have thoughts at all and apologize in my head, over and over.
None of this shit matters, ultimately, because somebody is dead.
Due to a mutual lack of skill in time management, Rory and I don’t manage to meet up before Uni starts up again but promise to make good on our plans once we’re both back in the city of monsters and voids. The most recent impression I have of her is an Instagram story, in which I notice that she has a hairstyle that reminds me of how I used to walk around as a teen (messy haircuts, rogue braids, bright, skilllessly dyed colors.) I can’t help but think about how her 13-year-old self would have bullied her for looking like me. That’s fucking petty of me, though. I don’t get points for having been a little sewer rat before it was cool.
I walk home at night, past my old elementary school. Everything in the yard looks so tiny now in daylight, but in the dark, it’s still big and momentous. A fucking fortress, a whole entire world. I climb the small fence and my shadow hovers over the scene, as if I am still a part of it.
Classes start, and I go home/leave home again. I stuff all the people and places, my bulldozer self and the city at night, into a little trunk inside my brain, to be dredged up again in a few months, or randomly at 3 am.
Thank you for reading neonghostcity!
Here are some of my favorite bits of writing about homes:
homesick by
i know love by
"bulldozer years" makes so much sense. Exactly how I felt back then. clumsy and destructive and definitely not hot and cool. I see a lot of my past mirrored in the train of thought here
Such beautiful writing here, so many standout lines and ideas. I've been thinking a lot recently about the idea that self-hate takes a lot of narcissism, and I was reminded of it again when you write about the funeral and begin by saying it's the first time you haven't thought of yourself in a while (or at least the speaker does). Loved this layered view of the past and how it shapes our present.