Not so easy

I’m back in my old hood, up on Alamo Square. I’m here to pick up cat food, but I’ve tak­en a detour up the hill to sit on this park bench and write.

This place seems off-lim­its to me now and I don’t like it. It’s been almost two years since I moved out. There are but­ter­flies in my stom­ach as though I might get caught. I am not stalk­ing Vik­ki; from what I know she moved sev­en months ago. So what is it that is pes­ter­ing me? Why am I skulk­ing around?

I guess an easy answer is that I want to be sure she’s gone. I am test­ing bound­aries that should­n’t exist any longer and I guess part of me does­n’t trust that. Did I come here to heal? Prob­a­bly not, since I’m so good at telling myself that I have no more heal­ing to do.

What­ev­er. I could sit here sec­ond-guess­ing myself all day. Does sit­ting on this bench some­how reclaim this ter­ri­to­ry for me? Of course not. This isn’t my neigh­bor­hood any longer. Or maybe it does and this can be my old neigh­bor­hood instead of a no-fly zone.

Either way, I just noticed some­thing odd. There aren’t any mem­o­ries of events involv­ing Vik­ki that come to mind here. The places them­selves tug at me like ghosts, but it’s not like the movies where every turn reveals a mem­o­ry of the good times that have passed. All of the things I loved about this neigh­bor­hood, all those good-time mem­o­ries, they are all things I expe­ri­enced by myself.

The­o­ry of the moment: the dis­com­fort I’m expe­ri­enc­ing is not that I miss Vik­ki, but that I’m angry that she took my neigh­bor­hood where I have so many mem­o­ries away from me. Could that be the source of it?

More like­ly it’s a com­bi­na­tion of things. For now though, I can get a cup of cof­fee at Abir’s, pick up the cat food, buy a cou­ple comix at Comix Expe­ri­ence, and Vik­ki can have her pill-pop­ping dog­catch­er in Wal­nut Creek. Heh heh heh.