I took the bus four blocks farther than I normally do. I was early to see my mom, and had so much work to do, still, grading all these assignments, so I thought I would go to the cafe I haven’t been to in, what, five years? Six, now? Just to sit there, to see what it was like, if anything had changed. I figured it hadn’t. Most things in that neighborhood don’t change. I missed the stop for the cafe, though, and the bus turned up the hill to where its last stop is, just outside the school I attended for sixth and seventh grades.
To my astonishment, the school looked completely different. It was like the whole building had been lifted off its foundations and replaced. The walls were black, and there were red accents everywhere. After this shock, another followed in quick succession: I knew that the school hadn’t looked like this when I went there, but I realized that I had no memory at all of what it had looked like.
Slowly, I walked the length of the block, staring at the front of the school, trying to replace what I saw with what I had seen nearly every weekday for two years. 2010 was half my life ago, but my life hasn’t been that long — not long enough to forget this much. What color were the walls? Had there been a tree there? Nothing. All that was left was what I saw in front of me: black walls, red windowsills, drawings posted in the windows. The trees had a sign on them that said they were planted in 2012. In front of the school, two benches: hard, metal benches, painted over in thick gummy paint. The one facing the street said CLASS OF 2010.
That bench. That was the only thing I remembered, the only point of continuity between then and now. They had us, the grade seven class of 2010, vote on what we wanted our legacy to be. I resented the entire exercise: it seemed foolish to me to celebrate “graduating” seventh grade, as if it was any kind of achievement. We could plant a tree, or donate books to the library, or put up this ugly fucking bench. I voted for the books, I’m pretty sure. Most of the kids didn’t vote. The bench won out.
I feel, sometimes, like a shapeshifter, shedding lives and taking on other ones, even as it feels like I remain, in truth, stagnant and unchanging. Some people look like the people they were as children. People who knew me three years ago don’t recognize me. People who knew me three years before that are even further removed. Sometimes they recognize my voice. That’s the only thing, though.
And my life, too, feels sometimes like it’s disappearing around me, the existence I had been accustomed to vanished without a trace, suddenly replaced by something else. When I tell people about what I was doing a few years ago, or what I did last week, or what I did when I was ten, it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not: it feels like I’m lying. There are too many gaps in the narrative, and the details that I do remember are trivial, meaningless, like the embellishments you would add to a story you were making up. And how can I say anything with certainty when everything I have, even myself, is a conglomerate? Small, disparate parts, forced together by time and pressure. A bench that means nothing to anyone. That’s no legacy.
Lately I’ve been trying to revisit those years, when I was 11 and 12. Or, rather, they’ve been visiting me, uninvited, drawing attention to themselves. It’s a feeling I get in a group of people. It’s the mornings when I wake up to find the red outline of a hand in my thigh — my own hand, gripping my leg so tightly in my sleep that it begins to bruise. An emptiness at the center of it all.
And I can’t tell you what happened, but I can tell you about the carpet. I can’t tell you what they said, but I can tell you about the weird texture of the wall in that dark, damp room. I don’t remember the school I went to, but I remember the bench. At least I have that.