Sarah Druhan

i. 

They told me that they would be able to return me to any place and any time I had been to in my life—all I had to do was think about it—and when I closed my eyes, the thing that bloomed behind them was my photography classroom from high school. I’m not sure why. When they transported me there, one hundred and twenty six miles away and fifteen years ago, it was late afternoon and the window blinds were drawn halfway shut, the rest of the room warmed by the cooling sunlight that reached sleepily underneath it. All of the school tablets had been turned off and were charging facedown on the teacher’s desk. It was early in the year, and outside you could hear the low reassuring rumble of young teenaged voices still hanging around and laughing, and of cars humming down the leafy streets before fading into nothing forever. Anyone who grew up in the suburbs knows that there is nothing more melancholy than the sound of a car passing by your window. It leaves a hollow echo that remains, remains, remains, reminding you of tall grandfather clocks shrouded in darkness and empty unfinished basements. It’s a similar feeling to being in a classroom in these unimaginable hours after four o’clock, when the hallways of your school are caught in the same lung of dark silence that you’ve seen touch everywhere in your life except this. I could feel it all around me: the softly bruising, autumnal ache of being somewhere thats meaning for you has long died. 

I was still not entirely sure what I was doing there, but when I saw the same seat at the long table in the corner that I had once occupied, I found myself sitting in it and looking around to drink in all the details I hadn’t realized I had forgotten: the whiteboard where the teacher had once committed a spelling error that had for so long made my friends and I cry with laughter to remember it, the closet in the corner where we had lain our printed photos in the stop bath, watching in awe as dark squares of frozen time unfurled into something we could touch. It had been an autumn semester elective class, and I remembered that sometimes the teacher would open this window to let the quiet, crisp breeze of the rest of the world flow into the rest of the room. I thought of all the memories I had about the autumn that existed in my high school days—the thready scent of woodsmoke on the air, the gray marbled skies veined with pale light—and how they every so often flickered into my mind even though time had long hollowed them of their color and sensation, like tiny invisible flames sometimes springing up unexpectedly in my hands. The life that I was terrified to know if I remembered correctly lay only a few steps away, just on the other side of that window. I could not bring myself to rise up and beckon it in. Instead, I sat frozen in my blue plastic chair, watching the light of another time chill and dwindle on the stark white walls until I was forced to return to where I had come from. I could feel the dark weight of my future looking to see where I had gone, and I could not bear to see it touch one of the few parts of myself that it had never been. 

ii.

When I came back again, I returned to the same room. This time, I could not resist. I reached for the door of the classroom and opened it, only to be nearly punched breathless by the sight of the long row of pale blue lockers. The hallway outside was just as I had remembered it, with enough scars and discrepancies to show how my memory had truly been inflated into the texture of reality: the peeling tape on the corners of a school spirit banner near the stairs, a forgotten Jansport backpack lounging sadly against the door frame of a nearby classroom, no one to see it but me. I walked slowly, reverently, through vastly empty layers of light and dust and unborrowed time, until I found myself walking into the art classroom where I remembered meeting my best friend freshman year. The sun of a late fall afternoon still leant casually through the windows, revealing to me swirls and patterns in the wood grain desks that I had never stopped to notice at fifteen. The gentle scents of pencil shavings and waxy crayon tips nearly knocked me over with their sudden familiarity, the memory of them shooting so violently to the surface of my mind that it felt as though the memory of my past self was also expanding too close to the surface, feeling uncertain and unwieldy inside this new and unknown body. I did not know what had become of the friend that I met here. I had heard from somebody a couple years ago that he had gone out to help with everything that had happened out West — I love hiking, I don’t care, he had once laughed to me when I’d poked fun at the overearnest collage of mountain vistas he’d made for a project, I’m going to move out to Oregon and get super in tune with nature and then you’ll be jealous, I know it. Like everybody else who went, he had never returned. Sometimes the fact of his former existence punctures me unexpectedly through the haze my mind has tried to draw over it and I am forced to reach for the nearest wall, suddenly dizzy, a sleeper snapped awake just as their body had begun to embrace the long, traitorous fall.

I took a step toward the window—a quiet, illicit thrill fluting coldly under my fingertips, the voyeuristic joy of ruining something that was once so ordinary to me with the delicious impossibility of seeking it out again—and looked out into trees ablaze with leaves of scarlet and champagne, a long paved road strewn with bright orange spillage underneath a sky as blue and as free as a neverending breath. It was all really there, as rich as I had remembered it: the bright azure and gold of a soap-bubble autumn that had yet to pop. Everything that I saw was not yet a remnant of a sad, ruined story, but part of the story itself. A lone biker rode by, whistling to herself, with no knowledge of the world that she was pedaling towards. I have told you before, and I will tell you again of the grandly contained silence of the suburbs, how one person’s trail of sound could leave auditory fingerprints behind them for what seemed like miles, insisting petulantly to the vast canyon of life, this is mine, this is mine, this is mine. It will never become anything else.

But the proof that that wasn’t true lay behind me in a photography classroom down the hall, yawning in the shape of the door that would bring me back to the place I had come from. What would I tell them when I returned? That a hole had punctured our once-gleaming wheel of seasons and I was looking at the evidence, that we had forgotten how if you pressed your fingers to a glass window, October had once contained enough life that you could feel it surge like a tangible silver tide on the other side? I couldn’t even begin to know. All I could do was what I knew I had to: tear myself away from the art classroom window and float slowly back in the direction that I had come from, feeling the warm and wasted breath of a different October already lapping hungrily at my feet. 

iii.

I believe they sent me back as some sort of half-hearted attempt to discover the big What Went Wrong, to see what could be changed to prevent our history from stuttering like a faulty, well-meaning heart. But instead of exploring the places in my life they wanted me to go, I returned for a third time to my high school—this time to the classroom on the second floor, where I had once been a sixteen-year-old struggling with geometry. 

In this place, there was nobody to ask me where I was going when they sent me away, and what I had found out. There was only sunlight on the chocolate-and-cream tiles and the softened silt of undisturbed time, which would be stirred into horrible, necessary movement when it was inevitably quickened by the lives of the teachers and students who would enter it the next morning. But in the absence of life, time lay silent and still and mercifully far from the place I had come from: I paced up and down the classroom’s aisles, inhaling the pleasantly caustic scent of permanent marker, tracing the long indents running across the cool white desks, mesmerized by the pencil and notebook that I found strewn over one of the desks in the back—real paper! A writing tool you could hold for yourself in your hands! I realize how odd it may seem, for me to rejoice over such mundane things. But you see, I have realized that to age into humanity’s present is to move farther and farther into something dark and cold, away from the glowing rooms of my youth to which the force of my life seems to have been forcibly confined. With nowhere to grow, the final shreds of my happiness fled back in time to become imprinted irreversibly on things I could never hope to touch again. You can see now how even the most boring of items can remind me of the unimaginable way my life used to make its own light. You can see now how, to survive, I could do nothing less than tear through the wasted years and hold it all again myself. 

I wasn’t foolish enough to open the window and touch the world that time had torn me from. But I stood by it and looked below for a very long time, watching as bright school buses trundled quaintly by and straggling teenagers walked in pairs down cream-colored sidewalks, their words pluming in clouds of silver before dissipating unnoticed on the wind. This country of woodsmoke and crystalline breath that nobody below me knew marked the end of forever. I closed my eyes, suddenly feeling very tired, and rested my forehead against the glass.

Yes, they sent me back to find out what could be done, to determine if there were any warning signs that could have been foreseen. But I think that we have always felt this was coming, whether we wanted to admit it or not. I remember leaving this school after my extracurriculars, well after the parking lots lay abandoned and everyone else was gone, feeling the solitude inherent in everything that time touched. Back then, something inside me still echoed relentlessly to the rhythm of the world, so much so that even its emptiness filled me with the slow, melancholy excitement of an impending thunderstorm. I’ve spent years trying to convince myself that I feel the same way. Now I remember how the distant bells from the nearby church seemed to herald something bigger than this silence, how they seemed to cry out to me and only me, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

iv.

When I walk through the door that brought me to the past and emerge into the long dark tunnel of the present, the first things I see are the masked faces in the lab staring at me with a frightened eagerness, desperate and terrified to hear what I have to say. They don’t voice the question that they want to ask, of course—nobody ever does. So I don’t tell them much. Only enough to get me sent back next time. When I walk back home, I walk the route I always do: past the scarlet stare of the cameras hovering blinklessly above the street corners, past the neon frenzies of the advertisement-choked buildings that refuse to dim, even for curfew. Towards the eternal expressway that passes on and on over the roof of my apartment like a throat, gorging itself on the night sky. I close my eyes as I walk, and I do not breathe. I have the music of another earth and another humanity welled up in my chest, music that once was our birthright to play, and I cannot bear to feel it rust away in my lungs again.

This isn’t where I imagined I’d be, I’d overheard someone say to their ring of acquaintances at a bar a few months ago. It was right after one of those weeks where the floods turned vicious and the rain roared like something forced within an inch of its life. They laughed quietly, self-deprecatingly, as soon as they’d said it, perhaps realizing their mistake. But it was too late. They’d skated dangerously close to the margins of The Question, and they could see it in the way all their friends’ faces fell flat and how they’d cast uncertain glances around the rest of the bar, searching for the line of dialogue that would return them all to the increasingly fragile world of daily habit and conversation. This isn’t where I imagined I’d be. The sentence spelling out the same jagged line that ran through everyone’s heart, etched there the moment we all realized that the lives we remembered were only ever something leading to this. 

There used to be a fall. A real fall, the old cashier at the convenience store sighed to me just the other day, watching with rheumy eyes as the storm outside smashed furious sheets of rain onto pavements filled with vaguely yellowed, curling leaves. He looked at me then with the same expression of the people that watch as I come out of the dark tunnel, as if asking for confirmation. This isn’t where I imagined I’d be. As always, I said nothing. I knew the answer, and he knew the answer, and if we acknowledged it, then we would never reach for time’s dutiful hand again, and it was our lot in life as humans to keep on doing so even if there no longer seemed to be any reasons why. I looked away from him and towards the window. I thought of pale white classrooms filled with silence and a present that had yet to rot. Clouds like burnished spills of champagne across the sky. The silver tide on the other side of the window. The season that still sang, and the thing inside me that once sang back.

v.

The last day I ever returned, I walked past every classroom I had ever sat in, watching dust float like weightless gold through the light on the desks. I stood by the entrance that I had gone through every day for four years, listening to the clock beside the stairwell tick, tick, tick softly to itself, each second dragging everything around me closer and closer to the darkness I had just left behind. Then I reached for the double doors in front of me, pushed at their handles, and I walked outside.

It all engulfed me in a sharp, dizzying wave the moment my foot touched the brick landing that kissed the bottom of the school doors. Autumn, real autumn, oh, the way that the light had been cold and amber at the same time, the sharp chime of its October-country crisp in your lungs, how could I ever, ever become a person who has forgotten that? I turned to walk across the front yard past the old familiar sign with the letters that shifted and changed depending on the announcements—HOMECOMING THIS FRIDAY 10/22—and underneath trees that rippled honey and flame. My best friend and I climbed one of these once, I remember, waiting for our parents to pick us up, and he had climbed up quicker than me. Oh, how he’d reached up through the branches and looked down at me from up there with such alive eyes, back when there were still things to reach for, and said come on come on come on in a voice that I no longer remember. I turned and walked through the tree line to the edge of the school on the very corner of the intersection and stood there, looking around at the shops and the banks and the people driving and strolling idly about in no particular hurry. A wind that was cool without being harsh fluttered through the leaves on the trees, flooding the streets with a subtle slate-colored excitement that my body awoke to remember. So it wasn’t just in my head—everything really had been better. I really had once been someone and somewhere else. I closed my eyes and tilted my head back, breathing air that hadn’t gone sterile for the first time in years, and thought, home, a word that I had not thought in a long time and that bloomed singularly somewhere deep in my body, filling my entire being with all of its necessary flowers and fractures. 

There is a day from late in my junior year that I think about often. It was around the time that the weather was beginning to act strangely, when flareups of it were still relatively rare enough that people called them “phenomena.” It had been storming badly all night and all day and the streets were beginning to swell with rushing brownish waters, to the point where an early school closure seemed imminent, and the teachers had wearily given up on restraining the students who poured eagerly out into the hallways to throng by the exits in wait of an announcement. We watched through the windows as the trees in the front yard were wind-lashed into howling, spindly seizures that I did not recognize. In those four years, that mere handful of my existence, it felt like I had spent centuries walking through those trees to reach the familiar brick building that I stood in front of now, observing the ancient hands of the seasons brush them gold and green and white. In the way of all teenagers, I was not yet old enough to understand that that daily walk was not ringed with eternity, and that it would some day leave my life. The woman who I think must have been the principal or the vice principal—there is only so much of the past I can really retain, after all, no matter how many times I reach for it—made her way to the head of the seething crowd and stood on a bench near the door. All right, she said, lowering the phone she’d been gripping grimly to her ear, all right, they’re saying the streets will be flooded by three; it’ll be an early shutdown today. Your parents have all been called. Everyone with a car is free to go. 

Almost uncontainable with glee, we all burst through the double doors and poured out into the rain. We tilted our faces up to the sky as if eager to receive the savior that had sprung us early from school and immediately shrieked with mirth at how suddenly and frenetically it hammered numbness into our faces, not knowing that this was the gentlest rain we would ever feel again. Any worries about the drive home or the state of our now-soaked clothing were washed quickly away. We were young and we were immortal and we painted the air with the vibrancy of our burgeoning lives as we twirled and laughed through the winds that tried to tear us away, and even if we ourselves—somehow, nonsensically—did not last forever, we were certain that this moment would. We would carry it with us wherever we went, in the ever-widening avenues of our future lives that we were beginning to feel, and that we stretched our arms out eagerly to inherit.

For some reason that I couldn’t explain, I turned back toward the school as I ran and noticed how the woman who had released us was turned slightly away from the fleeing crowd, as if she knew something we didn’t and was ashamed. I watched her silhouette turn dark in the flashes of warm spring lightning and wondered if this strange feeling of incongruence that suddenly filled the air was simply the feeling of getting older, and if the idea of my life growing into a new era would one day be not only normal but exciting. But that was back when I lived in a world written by people who are long gone now. Now I understand it was simply the fact that everything they had built was beginning to die, just as I was learning to live. I would never be able to reconcile that essential injustice enough to begin my own life and move past what it had been. Now I wondered if I even wanted to at all. How am I supposed to live with that? How is it possible, how could I have ever even been asked, to grow up and to carry that knowledge at the same time? I did not know now, and I did not know then. All I could do was run into the rain and into the rest of my life, towards a story that would always lead to the same ending, no matter how I would try and try to resist its ever-turning pages.

I turned now toward the brick wall of the high school that had not been mine for over a decade. Every day before going into my homeroom—just yesterday and a lifetime ago—I would stop to touch this very corner with the palm of my hand, a private good-luck charm that nobody else knew about except for me then and me now. I felt shaky enough that my hand trembled as I reached out to touch it, even as I was suddenly struck by the memory of looking in the mirror one day when I was eighteen and beginning to sense the world’s many fractures, furious tears standing in my eyes as I thought, I will be strong enough to make the life I deserve, in spite of it all, in spite of it all. So it really was true, I thought, no matter how much my body had tried to shield me from the pain of remembering it. I closed my eyes and inhaled the brisk gentleness of autumn air for what I knew would be the last time. There really had been a part of my life where I would look at the October cold-and-amber light leaning against this very brick, on the very edge of growing up, and think happily to myself: I have nothing but time.