Yesterday afternoon, sitting in the waning light of our living room while wet chunks of snow, rain, and hail fell from the sky, a sudden desire to hear a particular Simon and Garfunkel song came upon Ross, as it does; a half hour later he had the album in question in his possession, as you do. Listening to it now, I recall many waning evenings spent kneeling of the floor of my parents’ bedroom in my late childhood, playing “Silent Night/7-O’clock News” over and over—trying to catch the low murmur of tragedy in the background of the hymn.

Ross’s song was “Patterns.”

The night sets softly with the hush of falling leaves,
Casting shivering shadows on the houses through the trees,
And the light from a street lamp paints a pattern on my wall,
Like the pieces of a puzzle, or a child’s uneven scrawl.

And the pattern still remains on the wall where darkness fell,
And it’s fitting that it should, for in darkness I must dwell.
Like the color of my skin, or the day that I grow old,
My life is made of patterns that can scarcely be controlled.

Cheery pair, Paul and Art.

In the past couple of weeks I’ve been tagged six* times to do this meme that’s floating around the Internet where you make a list of twenty five things you want people to know about you. I thought I might as well say, for future reference, that I’m not going to do it no matter how many times I get tagged—because frankly, I feel that I have done plenty of that kind of sharing here, among other places. If you read me here, you know as much about me as I want you to.

But I am very much enjoying reading what my friends have been choosing to share, and one of them (a dearer heart the universe could not have made) ended her list with the following words: “If I have ever loved you,” she declared, “I still do.”

If I have ever loved you, I still do.

I felt lucky to know that. The love of a girl like that is well cherished. I’m afraid I can’t say that the same is true of me. I have adored many people in my life, quite sincerely and deeply and for long periods of time, whom I no longer love.

But I thought about what I could say, and searching through the swirl of memory and change I found that this, instead, was true: If I have ever loved you, you are with me still. I remember your face. I remember your voice. And I remember what you taught me.

*As of two minutes after I made this post, seven times.

When I was pretty little—five or six or so, I think—I used to have a ritual I’d engage in that was designed to fill me with a powerful and uncanny sense of how big and wild and swarming the world was. Now and again, when I was out in a crowded public place with my mother or my father, I’d pick a person among the strange throngs who surrounded me. I’d focus all my attention on them. I’d stare and stare for several minutes (or as long as I could, before they moved beyond my sight or a parent’s hand beckoned me away), trying to memorize their face and their clothing. I remember particularly doing this once from an upper level of a shopping center, sticking my head through the railing that overlooked the lower atrium and watching a man reading a newspaper on a round bench. Then I’d hold the image of the stranger in my mind’s eye, imagining what they’d done that morning, last night, last week, to lead them to this moment in which I was watching them so intently. Who were they? What were their lives like? Where did they come from, and where would they go next?

I’d keep their faces with me for later, and then—home in my bed, or wandering the balcony of my apartment, I’d call them up again, and this was when I’d get the real thrill, the real surreal shiver I was looking for. I cannot explain how bizarre it seemed to me, and how amazing, to contemplate the fact that the random person I’d fixated on earlier in the day still existed right now, going about their private business, even though neither I, nor anyone else, perhaps, was looking at them. They had a whole complicated existence as real as my own, and I couldn’t know a thing about it, but it was out there in the universe nonetheless. It was a staggering thought. And if I wanted to multiply my delicious incredulity even further, I’d remind myself that all this impossible existence wasn’t just true of the single person I’d watched that day, it was also true of all the other people I hadn’t watched—all the people in the world. They all, every one of them, had differentiated lives as full and intricate and palpable as my own (though I may not have given them credit for being as fascinating).

I gotta tell you, for a small egocentric being who hadn’t yet fully developed a theory of mind, the whole thing was pretty much a beautiful mind-fuck.

Coming home from Argyle on the train today, I thought about this for the first time in a long time, and tried to recreate the observance. It was much harder than it used to be. I was still interested in the people I was looking at, but it’s a funny thing, I guess; the more strangers you get to know in your life, the less sublimely separate from each other they seem.

Today was a day of wandering, memories, and familiar navigation (”If I got off the train here and walked this way, I’d end up where I used to do that“). It was a strange, sweet, sad sensation; vacation as reunion.

And my bookends, well, those were the best parts of the day: morning with Dana, sunny and warm, evening with Yael*: a silver bell ringing in the cool night.

*and Yael’s two exuberant dogs

Driving back into the city at 3 in the morning after 16 hours of traveling (our flight out of Houston, airport of scary Filipina — I think — women in charge of chivying people through security lines, was delayed for three hours), our taxi driver is curt and impatient with red lights. I think of our daily 7 minute cab rides home from delicious dinners to our little room in Puerto Viejo, over the world’s bumpiest roads, and of our final trip to the airport this morning (can it only have been this morning?) with the wonderful Alex of San Jose, formerly of Buenos Aires and with a wife from Venezuela and two lovely daughters (but only two! no more!), and I feel the sand of Costa Rica’s Caribbean coast I have gathered up these past two weeks falling slowly through my cupped fingers as I reenter the atmosphere of this city, suddenly cold and dull in comparison. I’m not so sad, though. I know that when all the grains have disappeared, they will leave behind some molted crab shells, the wing of a Blue Morpho, and perhaps a tiny gecko staring up at me from my palms.

I am beginning to realize just how much I am out of practice with moving.

I am feeling like a nervous monkey about how strange everything is going to be, and how even the slightest frown on someone’s face will make me wonder if the whole city is going to be mean.

I am missing my home in Cambridge already, and imagining what that first night in our unfamiliar, dark, half-empty house is going to be like, when we don’t know where the best pizza place is to get dinner from and we keep bumping our shins when we get up to pee because nothing is in the right place.

I think about the hour and forty five minutes it took us to get from Hyde Park to the North side to see a play yesterday, and I make a mental list of epic tomes I am going to be able to get through on audiobook within months of our arrival.

I understand that loneliness is going to come back into my life after years of having been away.

I remember that when you move, you shed your history and become a new person, at least until you make one real friend who knows you for you who are. Who will they be, and who will I?

We are making small, slow inroads into diminishing the mountains of possessions that have crept their way into our lives over the past nine years in this city and the last three years in this house, and I am making small, slow attempts to memorize pieces of this place that has become, if only temporarily and without pain, home.