Ghosts

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.