Day 134 - Blvd. Story

Blvd. Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Everything was ruined. Everything had come and gone and there was just an overwhelming sense of loss and confusion at what an uncertain future might bring. The boulevard had been lost, and with it, a bit of his past and a bit of his future and a bit of his home.

When it came to the promise of certainties in life, Mitch was unaware of the wit and wisdom of Ben Franklin, but in his opinion he was fairly certain that the only constants were change and the fact that time marches on with or without us. If he had been a thinking man, he might have combined those two thoughts, or at least understood the corollary that linked them. If he had been a thinking man he could have possibly theorized that Franklin was talking about the same things when he referred to death and taxes – that at some point the universe had the power and the schemes of man meant very little against that. Of course many men had big ideas about man’s power and man’s place in the cosmos. Mitch was not a man of big ideas. He just knew what he felt when he was confronted with change – a lonely anxiety, a mixture of mourning the loss of the past and fearing the insecurity of the future. His thoughts were on a small and immediate scale, without regard to the entirety of the human condition or the nature of life itself.

Mitch had spent his life in the neighborhood. From youth to adolescence to adulthood. He had become a man on these streets. And now the streets betrayed him and went away when he needed them the most. That was the way with things. They always went away.

The buildings came and the buildings went. Familiar stores closed and new ones took their place. At one point there were hobby shops and knickknack stores and crafts and arts establishments. He could play video games or duckpin bowling. He could make his own t-shirts with original designs. There was a carousel and a park and a slide and a swimming pool that was open in the summer.

He remembered them all. He remembered the books at the library and the kids walking home from school. He and his friends used to get sodas at the discount store and monster sized pizzas at the corner restaurant.

His first kiss came in the parking lot behind a furniture store. Two more kisses came in the backroom of the frozen yogurt shop where he worked one summer as a teenager. There were back alley paths he ran along and an old train line with a bridge over the river.

He couldn’t count the number of summer evenings spent here. He had lived and loved and lost like the songs said, but it was all his and his way. But it had all been replaced over time.

They were gone, but he could still see them: the familiar stores; the parking lot of innocence lost; the late nights at the park where he learned to drink like a man and the bathroom where he learned to vomit like a drunk. The past faded away, and his clinging memory proved to be a poor weapon.

Houses turned to apartments turned to condominiums. Specialty stores became restaurants and bars. He learned to swing dance at one of those bars, but that particular one was gone too, replaced by an English Pub.

Mitch felt very alone, for memories made bad companions. His friends and his youth had been replaced by newer and younger faces. There were always newer and younger everything. And everything new and young never knew or cared for what had come before and what had been special then. There was always something now that could be special and always something that was about to happen that could be special. There was no need to worry about what was and what had been forgotten.

Mitch felt like a forgotten and broken figure, alone and lost in the stretching sands. His boulevard was gone, replaced by someone else’s. His neighborhood had changed and evolved and outgrown him. All he was was a pitiable reminder of the past that no record or map seemed to follow.  It had all been a home to him, but the home had changed and gone away, and all Mitch had to show for it was a little sand in his shoe.