Unhappy Anniversaries

Almost forgotten amid the gloomy memories of this day, the four-years-since-everything-changed day, was the realization that it is exactly six months since we left Raleigh. March 11 was the day we walked out of our house forever, turned the key in the door and dropped it in the mailbox. The memory of that day seems both incredibly clear and somehow distant -- like something that happened to someone else, on another planet. This weekend we saw our former next-door neighbors, who were visiting New York. They told us about what had been happening on the street, about the new people who live in our house, about how they miss us. Seeing them was very wonderful -- for a moment it was as if we were back there, in that world that seems in retrospect so small, so green, so cozy. "We envy you a little," my neighbor said, "for taking such a bold step." I said I wasn't at all sure that they should. It's still quite unclear whether this was bold or crazy. Some days I feel like the stupidest person in the world. Like I threw away everything. Everything.

I thought, too, of the day four years ago. I remember it vividly too, in an odd, freeze-frame sort of way. How unreal it seemed at the time, and for a long time afterward. Today, we went to the Village on an errand, strolled around in the late afternoon torpor, the slanting sun hot on our necks. The East Village was packed with posers, so we walked north, aimlessly, up past Gramercy Park and up Lexington and then Park, a ghost town of shuttered offices, mostly, with here and there a sidewalk cafe, the bustle (a subdued, weekend bustle) of Grand Central Station. I tried to imagine how it must have been four years ago. A sort of shadowy impresson of that lay over my views of the normal scene, like a photographic double exposure, but perhaps it was only my imagination.

Six months. In the ordinary course of things, it can fly by. But this is the longest six months for me in many years. Sometimes I forget and all this seems ordinary, as if I had always been here, riding the subway, figuring out which items recycle, navigating my way through the new MoMa. As if the years I wasn't in New York were just a dream.