Fleeting Miles

There was nothing pretty about the dark charcoal cobblestone street Miles always took on his way home. Yet, the street, in memory, was perhaps the most significant street he'd ever cross in his life.

As he dragged his feet down the dirty sidewalk- littered, foul, bumpy, and covered in gum squashed so endlessly that it now adorned the dull ground with faded blots of color here and there- Miles remembered.

He remembered the smell of the street. The distance between each crack of the stone and pavement. The feeling of his foot pressed against the grimy sidewalk. Little traction. The thump of his and his friends’ sneakers pounding down the stone that supported them as they would run erratically in their youthful play and banter every other day after school.

Miles had always looked down at his feet as he walked, meaning he often missed what was happening around him. In any other street he’d miss a stranger’s gaze, the opportunity to wonder what of these characters, what’s on their mind, what their world is like. He’d miss the chance to casually sneak at the playlists selected by busy commuters waiting for the 8 a.m. bus, he'd miss the cars that zipped by, holding families, blasting songs, swerving potholes. But this was no “any other street”.

This street, with its messy array of electric cables and telephone wires polluting the sky view up, and its particular run-down street lamps and old shop signs, apartment building entrances invading the sidewalk, cigarette butts entrenched in the cracks and corners of every gulley. This street was Miles’ own memory. Here he lived perhaps his best moments; strange, mischievous and melancholic adventures with a cast of the kind of friends that exist only briefly in your life, with whom you share a lot until you don’t anymore. Walking down this street, Miles was always aware of what surrounded him, even without looking up. He knew where everything was, where it was going, how it all functioned, invariably. Not just because it was familiar, or so close to home he had to pass by it in order to go anywhere.

The street had stories. Every step Miles took unlocked old tales of his many lives, his temperaments and his character. Looking down, this sidewalk he now trotted was what grounded him. What remained a constant, even if the other pedestrians beside him changed with time. The scene never did.

Though knowing this was not THE last day he’d walk down this literal memory lane, Miles’ heart still swelled with the seeming importance that this would be, emotionally or spiritually, the last time he’d remember this feeling of belonging- as far as he could foresee. He feared too often of losing that, of feeling a certain emptiness, of life continuing once he moved past the street. That was a certainty he could never control nor change. Miles thought of all the times he’d walked down the avenue, knowing for sure he would be there again the next day. He was the constant in that street, but that was a feeling unique to that place, that he couldn’t quite displace anywhere else. It knew him and he knew it. Miles knew himself because of it. So, without this street, what of Miles?

But, then again, he himself was not a constant, was he? The friends he related to at different times in his youth, with whom he’d shared some sort of memory, that had changed. His and their tastes, personalities, forms of amusement, all those changed. Miles grew there but there had been so many versions of the same young man.

And his shoes. Those which carried him at each step down this cobblestone street, those changed too. Almost as if each pair contained a different Miles. Nothing, apparently, not even himself, had remained a constant except the street any version of himself had walked through.

So, Miles, hands buried in the pocket of his hoodie, a third of the way down the street, stopped in such realization, and looked deeply at his shoes on him now. Green and black Vans. Battling with the inevitable, sour oblivion of the stories he lived in that street, he stared at them. The sneakers that represented present Miles, the melancholic, grown up (ish?) Miles here now, wishing he could leave his mark and experience it all again. He wanted something to stamp him in time and space as the fleeting constant of that street and its life.

Though afraid to see the same from a different angle, as if that would change the meaning of everything he had felt in the past, Miles looked up at the street ahead of him. Then he looked behind at what he had walked and knew so well. He soaked it in, letting it sink, allowing the moment to root itself onto that ground he paved. And, in the messiness of the tightropes that connected so many above his head down this street he walked, Miles left his mark, and continued this path anew.