You are never the same when the footprint of a city steps into you, or you upon it. Whether you know it or like it is beside the point. Experience reaches through the invisible you and grabs you for as long as you'll stay and always gives a little something too; unfamiliar Atlantic air and glimpses into hard working bootstrap sidewalk city life and walking trails through history and centuries gone by and East coast corner Brazilian pastry shops when you didn't know a week ago that Brazilians lived in Boston or even what they ate, let alone - puff pastries. Experience happens whether you expect it or not.
Every person, like every city and pastry shop, is her own corner of the universe - a sole mecca surviving only because of the lives that inhabit her, who drop change into buckets or sit still long enough to notice the cracks - jagged lines of invitation to remember we are all strangers at some point, even to our children, even our parents to us, but life is carved into our backs and history? Well history is a stranger to no one; I can't remember the eyes of a woman mine met last week but history will never forget the dark creases of her name. Life exists before you came and will exist after you leave but history is never the same because you, absolutely, were alive, because you touched every corner you stumbled into and fumbled past, including - mine. That is what places and people whisper to each other, that we are flint and we are fire and change each others' compositions as our lives brush against each others', for a moment on the street or in a house for 15 years, but the flicker of what we speak aloud is quieter and less courageous than the sound our trailing footsteps leave behind as we exit a room down the escape route from our fears. From entire lives, even.
That is the invisible collision between us, that we stumble into and out of different lives and different times, across each others' borders and through apartment walls and city lines, and we can so easily forget the impressions we've made, or have been made upon us, and then we one day wake up thinking about yesterday's years and wonder what we did to pass the short days, how many doors we knocked on and who we opened ourselves up to or invited inside to stay. At some point it all seems incalculable. But really, it doesn't matter, the facts and figures that is, because we're each the shop and the customer, the city and the citizen, because we spend our days asking others to pay a premium for what we have to offer only to realize that all we have to offer is what others have given to us. Our feet take no steps without the ground; the ground makes no sound without our feet. That is the symbiotic nature of life happening as it sticks unnoticed to the soles of our own lack of appreciation as we pound our everydays into the streets.
That the sound of our life is really just the echo of the footsteps before us; that we cannot hear our own history because we move at the speed of life and change happens at the speed of sound and so often history is silent until long after it is made, and by that time we are moving full speed towards a new change, which means, perhaps - we ought to be thankful for cliffs of change before change falls into our lives just to believe in the fragility of the moment as it passes beneath us or passes us by, entirely. That every step we take upon the earth is a million lives deep. That, we don't have to know someone's name to know they are alive, to know somewhere their life matters to someone as much as mine..as much as mine matters to those who know me by my name.
My earth now is Somerville and this whole region and all these people I haven't met or do not know a thing about. The fascination is not in making a strange city my friend, or becoming fast friends with new strangers. It is that we do so everywhere we go, that without our knowledge or permission, we live amongst each other and together our history creates itself another layer of memory, around every corner - a new sidewalk of possibility. And if we sit still long enough, we can hear the footsteps echoing from a past we have yet to understand, our own footsteps from a future dream that we are already living.
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