julia

4/5/21

She opens her phone to a treasure trove of distant memories. Old places, with people whom she used to be close, and things she used to be. Phantom pains run through her leg. It’s normal to feel this sensation. At least that’s what she tells herself. The brain is feeling hurt from a scar that’s no longer there. It’s running through old patterns, like a needle drawing the etched groove on a pre-owned vinyl record, as it’s done thousands of times before.

Julia pulls her turntable out from under her bed and places a record on the mat. As the vinyl begins to spin, the haunting melody floods the dusty bedroom air in her Height-Ashbury apartment with old memories.

         All the leaves are brown

          and the sky is gray… 

         My voice is cheerful when I pick up her call. We’re on opposite coasts and in very different worlds – I’m in the collegiate bubble of a small town in New Hampshire; and she’s in the bustling corporate crowd among the neat rows of vibrantly tightly backed brownstones in San Francisco. We share the same first name – Julia — a vintage name, which our moms delicately picked for us. It suits our shared love for vintage things – for periwinkle mugs on porcelain saucers, and cups of black coffee before runs on warm, wet, rainy days.

I think my voice adds to the flood of memories on the other end of the line. I remind Julia of a place she once called home. I rattle on about the cold, wet, start of spring in Hanover, of short, shining days where the world sounds cold outside the window. I fawn over her sunny residence. I say I wish I could visit and run across the Golden Gate Bridge with her.

          I’d be safe in warm

         If I was in LA….

I tell her how it’s weird – like really weird, here at Dartmouth. Not like it was before she left. No late-night walks across the green or watching drunken mobs at Collis, no Sunday morning long runs, no sipping coffee in lecture halls, no more study groups in the library, no sporadic run-ins with old friends in fraternity basements. It’s like it was when campus was shut down her senior spring, except now it feels a bit more normal. I’m not sure if that’s because it is more normal or if it’s more normalized.

Dancing alone in your room to the End of the Line…

Last spring, we danced for the end in sight. Julia was a graduating senior. And of the graduating seniors on our cross-country team, she was the one who had her shit together. She was fully recovered from a the stress fractures she’d had in her shins, and she was prepping for a cross-country move for her new job as a diabetes researcher in California. I made her a playlist for the trip, comprised mostly of old songs from the Laurel Canyon; Tom Petty, the Byrds, the Eagles. I would move on to my second year at Dartmouth, and Julia would come and watch our team run in conference championships. I’d steadily run the course of my college career, albeit virtually. The pandemic would blow over in a matter of months, and it wouldn’t matter as much to lose the sentimentality of her senior spring. We didn’t even wear masks then. What a tough look. We laugh.

Except it didn’t blow over. Julia didn’t get to travel to California after graduating. Instead, she moved back into her childhood home and worked remotely until the start of this year. When she did get to the West Coast, she discovered that she’d again fractured her shins.

California Dreamin’

         on such a winter’s day…

The space between us feels far. To go from where I am to where she is – at least it feels far. It’s an eight-hour flight and a few years, but I know time passes quicker as my college years dwindle. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little scared.

We both know that life after college can be blue. “But to be on the other side of it,” she tells me, can be very gloomy. To work from 7 am to 10 pm and wake up and do the same thing the next day, without the outlet of running, is rough. Your identity for such a long and seemingly significant portion of your life is intertwined with being a Division I athlete with a vibrant social circle and Ivy League academic pursuits – all of which are seemingly stripped with the receival of a diploma. “What matters?” she asks me. I know running is something Julia needs in her life. Being intellectually challenged and having a group of close friends nearby. All of which I currently have in dark, grey New Hampshire. Julia knows to how to inhabit old ghosts through songs or an old photo album.

When the yellow ghost Snapchat memory tells her it’s been a year since we made all of our plans – her move to California, her dreams of running a marathon there, and of socializing with nearby alums and runs with old friends – the shell of her current reality pains her a little. Is it a pain for lost time? Grief? She cannot tell. A phantom pain? The brain is feeling hurt from a scar that’s no longer there. It’s running through old patterns. She can’t help but revel in the nostalgia. It’s in my voice and in the photos on her phone and through the songs she’s playing on the record player.

“It’s tough to love something so much,” I tell her.

We talk a bit more, but she tells me she’s almost at the park – the Golden Gate Park, where she’s meeting her coworkers in-person for the first time. Things are ending and things are starting all the time. As we speak, the sun is setting in the Bay Area and casting a golden glow over the masked faces on picnic blankets and shadows on those laying under the trunks of sweet bay trees. And three hours make all the difference. Where I am, it’s been hours since I closed my blinds and flickered the lights on in my dorm room – the stars are out. We exchange goodbyes, and I think of old times, of Julia dancing to the End of the Line in the waning New England sunshine in her maple-walled room.

it’s alright, even if the sun don’t shine
we’re going to the end of the line