the second time around

Suddenly, walking into the Goethe Institute in New York, it was as if so many years that had passed had not passed. The same lady with the long white hair was still there, so lovable and gruff in a way that still kept me in an anxious fear of her. The library is the same as it was when I had left: peaceful and often empty, filled with books and magazines and cassette tapes of thousands of words of text in German.

I pick up a literary magazine and started reading about the life of Ingebourg Bachmann but had to stop because it was too much of a train wreck. I don't enjoy the fact that so many brilliant women end up destroying themselves, and men likewise, but why can't you see the beauty of the world without slashing your wrists if you have ovaries?

I remember where the secret bathroom is: on the second floor, inside the wall, although you would never know it was a door unless you were looking for it or if someone pointed it out to you. The chandeliers are still there too. I used to come here looking for something; then up the street was the neue galerie where L worked. These were thoughtful and quiet places in a place where nobody stopped to think, where things were always rushing way too fast and it still is so easy to forget what happens five moments before. Unfold your fingers one by one and it is so obvious: you forget! everything.

There are always mirrors in the women's bathrooms. You can stare at yourself, either satisfied or dissatisfied, or as you get older, just indifferent. Going to these same places where I used to go so often, I always get hit with a wave of nostalgia. It was me as I was many years before, just with lines around my face, and maybe a calmer approach to life as well as some rich experiences which I hope I can shape into something meaningful.

Or maybe it's fine to just leave the experiences alone, for sometimes you just live life and see things without trying to mold it into something that will be useful to you later on.

It's the same face, but I broke my glasses a few weeks before when I was on the bed coughing with a bad case of the flu, and this whole week the cough has been lingering and my voice is artificially ragged and deeper than it usually is (which is fine, because I have to modulate it artificially anyway to avoid sounding like a 14 year old mousketeer). And my eyes are dry and uncomfortable in these new glasses which age me somewhat and make me feel like a different person.

Down in the library again, flipping through the latest issue of the Zeit newspaper, a weird periodical that i reserve for lazy sunday afternoons or times like these, when i'm not so interested in learning about the current events in the world as I am in of skimming over really attractively designed layouts and photographs and snipping small bites of experience from random articles without every finishing everything. Their articles are beautiful and long and rambling anyhow; always an investigation into an idea that you had that was never really totally right.

Suddenly a man comes in, nodding to the librarian--does he come here every day? With a paper bag and takes off his jacket and then opens a secret back glass door and in a shock I realize that there's a garden in the back where you can sit. It's a pretty little garden, visible through our little atrium, so surprisingly peaceful and quiet considering we're across the street from the Met and avenues over from the hubbub of Park and Lexington and the Upper East Side stroller mafia.

He stares back at me curiously, because he probably considers this to be his library and his place and his garden. I can't help watching him eat the apple, wondering why I never tried to find the garden when I lived here so many years ago.

That's the lesson, one of them, I think I have learned as I pull away from my youth and enter middle age. It's such a cliche but it's true. The older you get the more you realize how little you know, and even what I know is a loose fabric of thoughts and experiences and that there are so many things that I have overlooked or forgotten. It pays to come around a second time to pause and take a look around and see what you missed the first time.