On the Anniversary of my Return to Buffalo

 

The Return

Delaware Park, Buffalo

 

 

               With each step around Delaware Lake, I feel their presence.  The ground squishy with moisture, as I walk, the first face appears.   Like when I was a child back from a day out, my uncle asks me what I have seen on my adventures.  “A rabbit?  A fox?’  And as if such things were even possible in the city, I vigorously shake my head.   Crossing a grove of trees I relive all the trips to the hospital for chemo, my mother clutching the plastic container she vomits into.  Five years of her pain see me through high school and give me the possibility of escape. 

            Yet I can recover great pleasure too.  I find my first love, Daniel, looking like Jesus in a Rafael painting.  We lay on a rooftop in August or under a blanket on the winter floor for hours on end pulsing to the universe.  His scent acrid like a farmhand’s sweat fills my brain.

Each moist step forgives and brings back the past.  Dunlop Tire and Rubber filled my father’s lungs with asbestos, leaving him on mood altering steroids and an asthma inhaler.  The delicacy of his peeling my fruit and mending my clothes contrasted sharply with the bouts of rage that erupted from nowhere and found me shaking in silence. 

            This city provided a framework to my existence, the years when I was so shy as to be unable to speak.  The heritage of an immigrant past meant never to stand out, as such pride could lead to a trip to Siberia or even worse.  On my return I find the remains of that person who had no way to construct the boundaries needed just to survive.  I could flow into the rivulets that empty into the lake, a motionless expanse of water. 

            This place resides in my blood, inhabiting a white winter landscape and the endless sunlight of summer.  This verge of spring fills each cell with longing and memory. 

            Across the street, I gravitate to the anonymity of the local university library, doubting I can still pass for a student.  The clock chimes the quarter hours as definitively as the local cathedral in the Spanish town I inhabited for so many years.  Another fifteen minutes and my mind is still racing, facing the blank page in front of me.    From the window, the grey sky is the color of a Paris winter where buildings and air meld together. 

            The old me, who I thought I’d squelched so long ago resurfaces.  In my dream I am lying in bed.  The doctor comes to visit but turns out to be my French dentist.  He examines me and tells me the problem is my heart.  I get out of bed to walk outside to find giant snowflakes swirling in the night sky. Can a return bring recovery?