The past is tricky thing. I’m not sure if it exists at all, but at the very least my mind is triggered by certain people, places and things to release a sputtering stream of selective memories and slumbering emotions.
I’m sitting in a chair at the Open Eye Café, a coffee shop in Carrboro, NC where I spent countless hours brooding and dreaming. This was all years ago, when the café was in the building next door, in a cramped but charming little space that became known as “Carrboro’s living room.” It really was a second living room for me, just a stone’s throw from my old house on West Carr St. The chair next to me is an original from the old space. It’s green and stiff-backed and tattered. I used to hate being stuck with that chair, if the place was too crowded to score a spot on the sofa. The new space is huge, and there are enough chairs and tables to hold a town meeting.
I used to know the whole staff, but today all the faces are new. Tattoo-clad Carrboro scene-sters, dressed in funky thrift store vintage, too cool for school and a little too aloof, too detached. Maybe it’s just me.
Last week I was home with the family, the ghosts of yesterday floating through every nook and cranny, coloring my perception, making things smoky and sentimental. Last night Eric and I went out to see a rock show at the “Resevoir,” which used to be “Go! Studios” back in the day. The stage where I played my final show with the band is now where the bar is. The new stage is where the bar used to be. Everything is mixed up, muddled, mangled a bit. Things are not quite where they should be. Like in a dream, only I’m not dreaming. I think.
I hear there’s a respectable family now living in the old house. I cruised down Carr St. to take a look, but it was hard to make anything out through the trees, hard to tell if there’s even a house there anymore. I thought about going up the long, winding driveway to get a closer look, but I didn’t want to freak anybody out. I didn’t want to freak myself out.
Perhaps, in that house, I’m the ghost floating about.