Just Short of a Eulogy

If you take all the right turns in King's Park West, you'll come to a cul-de-sac off a cul-de-sac. One that if you snake your way down towards the pipestem, you'll find a modest, understated rambler with a carport flanking classic colonial red-brick. Google maps show that the new owners painted the shutters a tasteful shade of sage.

If you found yourself at this exact spot in 2006, you would have noticed the neighbor's peculiar mailbox: a spirited, life-sized manatee that had an outfit for every holiday. Odds are, you also would've seen me, a rail-thin kid with a closet of only sports jerseys who had a penchant for living outside during Virginia summertimes.

Braddock and Wakefield Chapel. The only two roads you had to take. Two roads that I am sure 10-year-old me traversed tens if not hundreds of times.

***

Fifteen years later, I can drive myself. Sitting shotgun is the owner of the car — my girlfriend, Kathryn. First, I take a left on Braddock, then another for Wakefield Chappel, and a final onto Ardfour.

Our trek from my childhood home to hers lasts all of ten minutes. It is peaceful and green, as are most drives in Northern Virginia during the spring, where everything comes to life all at once.

Nestled behind a row of sycamores or maybe some other shade tree is the place she grew up. It is everything she told me it was -- peculiar, light-filled, and in some sense, haunted.

***

A year later, I am back in the townhouse she, her Mom, and her dog have all called home since selling the Ardfour house.

These trips fill me with an unidentifiable sense of unease. Like walking into a room you once used to occupy and now no longer recognize.

I get emotional thinking about my time in Fairfax, Virginia. For what reasons, I could not tell you. It was neither long nor formative in any way.

Inexplicably, this is the period in my life I remember most viscerally.

These trips should be a person I love opening their world to me, but instead, I often find myself reimmersed into a past world of my own.
***

It's embarrassing to admit that a part of me longed for that old world; one that is dismayed to find that they replaced Friendly's with the Five Guys from down the street and that the pizza place that had the Monday night deal didn't make it past the recession.

How laughable it is to memorialize a place that was never meant to be missed.

Driving past every old haunt, I imagined the endless faces of kids that are succumbing to the mundane throes of suburbia. How they too will watch their world change with a certain quiet ease.

This venture led me to Patriot Square, a hapless strip mall where Marshall practiced karate, and my Dad would take us to see $2 movies. A few loose tears dribbled out upon seeing both still standing.

I know it is supposed to feel trivial, but at that moment, their survival had a comforting gravity. These places that I held so dear didn't become a fucking Jamba Juice or something incredibly stupid. Even if not really, they were mine in some way.

My final stop is at the gates of the pool that I know won't be open then but will be on Memorial Day. From a few hundred yards away, if I squint, it all looks the way I left it.

I'm sure it's not. I'm sure they had to replace the diving board after Nick or Buck, or whatever neighborhood boy slipped during a dive meet and cracked his head clean open.

I sat there trying to remember which one it was for a long time. Then for even longer, I wondered if you ever really get all that blood out.