In those days my city had not yet become a sad imitation of itself. I’d spend the evenings wandering through the park or riding the streetcar, sipping coffee from paper cups and reading books I’d borrowed from the library. If I’d been paid recently I’d buy a bottle of wine and walk into the hills until I found a quiet place to watch the rest of the world. If I’d worked hard that day and written a few pages of honest prose I might stay out late at one of the bars on Broadway. In the morning I’d wake up early and walk along the empty streets, wondering if I’d survived some private sort of apocalypse. 

I lived in an attic apartment on the edge of Washington Park. It was a lovely place to be lonely: perched high above the street, hidden among the treetops, suspended between the city and the sky. Back then my entire life could fit inside a tiny room with one window. I’d sit at my desk for hours and hours, reading nineteenth-century novels and trying to write my own. Anna lived in the apartment beneath mine. She kept one of Hesse’s watercolors taped to the wall above her bed and claimed that he’d found more beauty in a few bright colors than he ever did with words. We fell in love eventually, but only after I’d moved away.

I’d meet Elsa in the afternoons at her apartment near Westover Park. We’d drink tea and listen to songs about other people’s love. “I like you best when your eyes are closed,” she’d say to me, so we’d fall asleep and dream of being someplace far away. She always awoke before I did, and when I’d sit up in bed I’d see her standing at the window, watching the children playing in the park, her eyes filled with a sadness I could not comprehend.

Shortly before I moved away I met a young man named Simon. We became friends for a little while, though both of us knew that our relationship would never last. I was quiet and cautious and incapable of escaping my conscience. He acted as though the world would end with every sunset. Years later I heard about his death from an old acquaintance, and at first I refused to believe that it was true. Since then, however, I’ve met more of his kind, and I’ve learned that a lust for life and a longing for death are often the same desire.

I left my city on a Sunday morning in late December, swearing as the train dragged me away that I’d never return. Thirty-six years have drifted by, and now I am standing on the sidewalk in front of my old apartment, thinking about the past as though it is a poem. Time has taken the truth from me over and over again, leaving me alone with my lies at last.