Facade
Its an oddity. This place you've known so well for four years, the landscape that has changed in only minor bits and pieces, a slap of new architecture and design over there, a new bush over here,and yet there is a whole wall of separation between then and now. The physicality of the experience is inconsistent with the sensation: this should have been demolished in your absence, but the fact that it remains while you have moved on only points out conclusively that YOU are the object out of place and time. There is nothing you can put a finger on as missing, except the connection to the place, and the grass where once you ran the dog in those summer evenings when you watched the Indian kids playing cricket, or that collection of trees by the library where you and she might have met between classes, fought or kissed or mourned the inevitable passing of feeling...regardless, the grass and concrete still remember the sentiment, still remember words long after you have forgotten them. You are out of place now, the alien from another time, another world, tresspassing here in the world of the ravenous present, ever rolling on to swallow the future and leave the past stranded in the dust. An odd sensation, the feeling of the pariah, even if only readily evident to you, while the other students pass by assuming you are one of them, registering you as simply another of their ranks, a kindred spirit, rather than the specter that might warn them from years in advance. Here, I could stretch out a hand through the wall of time, plunge a fist through the beast that seems to crawl to them, while it gallops away from me. I could warn, make my dire prognostications, tell them when they leave to never return because there are no more familiar faces to crowd the walkways and the shroud of familiarity is tattered. I clutch at this stone block where I used to sit and ponder love and committments and the unknowable future while riding the back of the hungry Present. I detach from the stone and the memory, a brief invasion into the past from this alien of time and space, and I pull my jacket a little tighter against the breeze created by the Present running tormentingly playful circles around my weary time-traveling form.