I Go Back To The House for A Book

When something really strikes me, it tends to stay with me for a long time. After I read a particularly good book, I find my mind wandering to it for days after. There's a poem I read for a project in high school that I still find myself thinking about. It's by Billy Collins, and I especially love the first stanza.

I Go Back To The House For A Book

I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor's office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

 

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

After making a big decision (which I've agonized over because I'm one of the most indecisive people I know), or just when I'm feeling nostalgic, I can almost picture these ghosts of me. The one who stuck it out at my first college instead of transferring to somewhere I felt more comfortable, sitting at a desk in some office as I trudge, begrudgingly, through law school, because that is what I was supposed to do. The me who never made the completely out-of-character decision to go to sorority rush (when I wasn't even sure what it was), continuing through life without a group of girls with whom I felt at home, never really knowing what I was missing. Or the bit less patient me who decided, after a particularly important relationship talk with Brian, that the long distance and life we're standing on the precipice of just wasn't for me. The me that sat at home this weekend because a couple hours wasn't worth it. The me who spoke up and stood up for myself a bit more often. The me who kept my feelings to myself when I should have. The me who made fewer mistakes. The me who did everything right.

But those ghosts aren't me. The me that made all of those decisions is sitting on my computer in a hotel room in New York, alone, catching up on homework for a degree that will allow me to be a teacher and talking to a couple of the girls who that fateful sorority rush brought into my life, just to spend just a couple hours with my boyfriend, the love of my whole life, content in the fact that no other combination of choices could have brought me to this exact moment.

I just feel so lucky that they have.