As I walked the empty streets, I was filled with the company of my memories.

As I walked the damp streets of Boston back to the apartment where I've been staying this week, I was alone in my thoughts and surrounded with the memories of years. In Harvard Square, I walked by Au Bon Pain, where I saw my dad eating dinner with me four years ago, and I saw my mom in the children's bookstore on the corner where Curious George makes his home. I saw myself at Border Cafe with different groups of people, going to Toscanini's for ice cream after orchestra concerts, going out before BPO concerts. I walked on the Charles river on Saturday, and I remembered walking with my father from Cambridge to Boston, one ambitious fall day, and I saw the hotel my mother and I stayed in when I moved to Boston 5 years ago. Taking the green line home reminds me of last summer and my daily commutes to Newton, and walking on Park reminds me of all the people who I've visited on that street. Some of those people have come and gone from my life-despite what facebook tries to tell you, you can't stay in touch with everyone from your past. People disappear over time from your life, and your shared memories are your gifts to the future and present. Friends move, people change, and you must have the wisdom to know when to hold on, and when it's time to let go. Sometimes, distance and change can keep people together, but other times, it is the wind which blows the sand away. Rather than cling to something that has long past, we can only hope that we will build new memories, with new people, and that those too may fade. But to have experienced them at all, is what is most important and most valuable.
I'm not at home in Rochester because I have no stored memories there, and even now, I feel like a visitor in a place I don't want to build memories in. I have a few moments of company here and there, but most of my memories inhabit the winding paths and brick buildings of Boston. They wait like ghosts in the caverns of my mind, and when I invite them in, they make themselves at home, until they too, slowly fade away, like the last goose flying away for winter into the dusky sunset.

Currently listening to: the Dodo's.