Wednesday, 27 April 2011

The Past Is Gone

I walked past my old primary school today. I think you Americans call it Elementary School. Anyway, it's the place I stopped going to when I was eleven.

It's similar to how it was but it's not the same. They've replaced the windows, built a new classroom and taken out the shed (which I mentioned a few days back in my Steptoe & Son post).

These little pieces of school that existed in my head are gone. They don't exist in the real world, only in my mind. The reality is a building with new windows and a paranoid metal fence. And it means nothing to me. The picture in my head means everything.

Pretty soon everything changes. The years go by and the buildings fall apart and everyone looks twenty years older. And a while after that the buildings are gone and the people are too.

And you capture this image of life and you keep it in your mind because it's the only thing that's real even though it doesn't exist at all.

You can get married or find a soulmate, you can even talk to someone you knew when you were small. But they saw something else. Their lives are a photograph of a place of a town that existed once, and just for a while.

Nothing lasts. It evaporates into thin air. And then it's someone else's turn.

Care to share?


  1. This made me sad...

    Mostly because I used to think about that all the time and I just have such a hard time of letting go of the past and accepting that everything changes.

  2. Or Grammar school, if you're old. But that's hardly the point.

  3. I'm like wallflower in that I don't like to let go of the past.
    My favourite sports team are leaving their home ground of 110 years at the end of this season and I'm dreading that final home game.
    After that The Willows will be just another place that will exist only in my memory much like my favourite cinema which is now a nightclub and my favourite pub which is now a car park.

  4. As I get older and lose people in my life I realize that there are less and less people that I share history with anymore. That is sometimes a harsh reality, but it also makes me apprreciate those even older than I. So I make more time to listen to their stories, because the stories are the memories that stay with us.

    Great post.

  5. It's interesting how time flies as we get older. When we are younger, it seems that life is slower and time is slower. And, yet - sometimes as we get older we tend to forget the precious moments in life. Thanks for another thought provoking post! :)