Going back to what was

The campus looked wildly different. The old student union had been demolished and the new one was raised a hundred yards back and off the center of campus, opening up the campus mall in a sea of fresh cement and plant life. The muddy little creek that used to run by the parking lot now flowed through the mall.

Inside the student center everything looked fresh as well. It even smelled fresh. As He made my way along the hallways, he discovered that everything was still called the same thing, but nothing looked the same. “The Cabin,” a dark and dusty windowless lounge reminiscent of an old dive bar was now pushed out to the exterior.

He made his way over to the library to at least physically orient himself to something that was the same. Same bricks, same layout, even most of the same paintings were still on the wall. Yet here there were small nuanced changes, like exercise rooms in the center of the library floors sporting an elliptical, a treadmill and a bicycle. “Mind & Body Fitness” it said on the door.

Many of the buildings indeed were the same from his days there at the turn of the century. Yet he found that none of the old feelings were. None of those feelings of timidity or bashfulness. He realized he was no longer afraid to succeed. Afraid to simply approach life and say, “Hey.”

He used to dread the thought of approaching someone, afraid of pushing out over new ground and opening a conversation. Afraid to open his own weaknesses and shortcomings to the cutting edge. Afraid to let that block of wood be touched by the sharp blade that would loosen the masterpiece within. Those days where he sat hunched, defending himself against the knives that wanted to cut away the corners and chip away the dross—the very things that held him captive inside its walls.

Even as he was afraid of success, he was afraid of failure. Afraid of what it would do to him if he tried and came up short. So instead he never got started.

He was suddenly overcome with the desire to go back. To wipe out the dreams that haunted him—the ones where he showed up to class to discover he had missed half the semester and was now receiving a failing grade. The ones where five years had simply slipped away and vanished.

He would open those nightmares to reality. Ground them in the truth. Drown them in movement. Create in time a physical reality that would stick, even in his dreams.

A look

He held it for awhile and then looked out over the dying hill. Exhaling he could just make out the swirl of dusty air that quickly unfurled like a flag being lifted in a breeze.

Groundness

No one knew where the turnings would take him. Not above, not below, though maybe just to that point where sinking, sputtering, the world would spin and ebb and flow and he'd travel just that like--half in and half out, bobbing along in the currents circling a full earth. Many were like that, adventures that is, like that full circle, or full Y, drifting that way then rounding back and moving off again to return years later to familiar waters, old haunts, packed ground trod by the footfalls of a million others and yet beneath it all still recognizing his own faded impressions upon the soft ground.

It's hard to make yourself return. It's hard to retrace and recover ground you thought you'd never lose. What is it that makes us yearn for the old patterns of our thoughts, the ruts we thought we had finally pressed on and over, the ones where we had worked up the courage to climb out of the trench and force our feet over contested ground, the bullets whizzing and popping over our heads. How do we make ourselves look back down that hill once gained and see the bodies we left behind, the ones we said we'd never leave, even if we had to drag them over miles of enemy ground? Sometimes we look back and see our own body lying there and are glad it died, glad it left itself among the thousands of others who also fell on that hill, on that battle ground. Glad we could let our souls leave the once occupied shell that we thought we could never leave, never escape.

Pushing on made him feel better. Better but with that tinge that always starts in the bottom of the gut and works its way to the edges of temples, raising microscopic hairs like the planting of a flag on newly captured ground. Missing, if for nothing else, familiarity.