kenjisan

Old haunts

In Pattern Recognition, William Gibson notes the "mirror world" of England: things in London are so similar to their American equivalents that they're nearly identical, yet everything feels just a little bit off. The milk tastes different, the McDonalds serves curry, and even a regular sentence is said with a foreign inflection. His words rang true when I first read them, and last weekend they quickly came to mind.

But as strange as it is traveling to another country, it may be stranger to travel into one's past. I was reminded of this about a month ago when I returned to UVA, nearly four years after graduating. Jon put it very well when he spoke of how everything—the buildings, the classrooms, the cafeterias, the grass, the trees, the restaurants, and all the things above and below—felt nostalgically familiar, yet were no longer ours. A new generation had commandeered not only our physical localities, but our lifestyles, and they did it without a twinge of regret or a flutter of remorse.

Now, imagine the collision of surreal emotion that would result in traveling both into the past and into England's mirror world. The photo above is of my old workplace. Eerily familiar, yet changed. The pubs we went to around it have closed or have changed names. The building that was being built across the street has been completed, standing tall, a glassy monument to modern London. And the workers inside, the usurpers of my past, tap away at keyboards that were once mine, calling on phones that I'd used before, and going about their daily lives... as they should.

It was nice returning to London. I had a wonderful time there, but unlike the first trip—and certainly the second—I felt like a visitor. A particularly knowledgeable visitor, but a visitor nonetheless. Like UVA, so many things stirred up a happy, very wistful, memory. And like UVA, I was reminded in not-so-many-words that my time was over and another’s—thousands of others—are just beginning.