Relic
The town remains, but not the same. New people, young people, come, as the old ones die away. We’re all becoming, like the city, worn out, replaced, renewed (if we’re lucky). But it’s a fight against time that cannot be won or abated. Sometimes I will look at someone and think, they weren’t even born when I last went to that café that no longer exists, where I loved to hang out but was usually too busy in school to take the time to go there. The charming place with the dark wood booths and the cobwebs on the ceiling fans, where a cup of coffee was literally, one dollar and twenty-seven cents. Now, there are new buildings gracing the once sky-filled streets, which they’ve glazed in mirrored glass to hide their bulk. And the bookstores, in a very bookish town, have dwindled to one, as good as it is, only one quarter the size of the four or five that were here before. Well, we know who to thank for that. But if you talk like this too often, people start to see you as the figure from a sepia-tinted photo, the one in a shuttered, dusty room in some untended house that’s older than the hills, as they say, in the room no one goes into, and if they do, they are looking for something else. They don’t even bother to look at you, already on to whatever it is.