Pillars

I sat today between was and is, between then and now, somehow suspended in the bittersweet nostalgia for memories I cannot claim and experiences inseparable from my being.  Tempe Town Lake, also inappropriately named Tempe Beach Park: here every breath I take is infused with past versions of myself, all culminating into one singular heart beat.  The late afternoon sun casts beauty and romance over the scene; perhaps my reflections would be different in the garish light of noon.  Today, though, I muse about how a life is made of a series of moments, moments that cannot overlap, cannot exist side by side.  Places are not like that though.  They absorb time, hold onto the moments that we cannot.

One bridge of steel trestles and wooden planks and the other of concrete and cables.  The past and the present run parallel yet converge into a single origin.  The light rail glides past on its way to Downtown Phoenix, just a slight increase in the volume of the background noise.  The sun shines through the number 1912, cut into the cross piece of the trestles on the old Tempe Union Pacific Railroad; sitting on my perch in 1912 a passing train would have produced a much more profound ruckus.

The 1912 train sends vibrations through the air and the ground, causing my bench to vibrate and filling my ears with the clacking roar of the steam engine lugging its cargo to some far off destination.  This is the nostalgia that does not belong to me; pointless reminiscence of a time I do not remember and experiences I will never have.  And yet who can look at the relics of the past and resist the temptation to daydream about their memories, the lives they witnessed?  The actors are long gone, long forgotten and yet nearly a century later the stage – these tracks – survives.  They tell no tales, and so I create my own; shadows of the past against a bright blue sky, they take form but lack detail and are as fleeting as the time on which they are based.

As late afternoon turns to evening, the colors in the park are amazing.  Turning towards the Mill Avenue bridge I am brought back to the present.   I turn my lens toward the subtle nuances of the pastel shades and the duality between the fluidity of the lake and the geometry of the bridge.

Everywhere I look here, memories become superimposed.  Along that bridge I walked with my first love in the dying days of our relationship, blissful in our ignorance of the future.  Skip ahead just a few months to see two freshman girls from Hayden West jogging along the waterfront, under those arches.  “We just have to make it past the bridge and we can take a break.”  “Okay. Deal.”  And then the two friends become sisters and they laugh and talk in the same voice from so many hours spent together.  Across the lake on the north side I run alone as evening falls, listening only to the sound of my Nike footfalls and the chatter of sorority girls as I approach and pass them.  I run those paths countless times, up one side of the lake and down the other, passing the Tempe Center for the Arts where one night two lovers took their secrets from the stone wall and shared them with each other, the heightening of a romance in which every moment encompassed seemingly infinite intensity and passion, a fire to blind and a fire to burn.  A fire to watch sink into the lake with tears in my eyes as I said goodbye to Arizona alone.  A goodbye that lasted two years until I found myself looking out at the dried out lake from the window of a train that passed me by today with barely a roar.  My camera pointed out the window to capture the defeat of engineering, the dried up lake that glistened today as a rower’s boat glided between the pillars of the past and the present.