Wasted all day at MapQuest looking at maps of the town where I grew-up, remembering places and times which I knew better than I ever realized, intersections of roads and lives.  It was like covering the bedspread with snapshots from memory.  There was the road to my high school, recalling the morning rides with my aunt, who was a teacher there, and her friend, my German teacher, who was a married closeted gay man.  He drank every morning, and before we picked him up, he ate an onion as though it were an apple.  I assume he did this to conceal the scent of alcohol, though it only added odor upon odor. 

There was that spot, off Boundary Street, where I went with Paul one June night to practice The Joy of Gay Sex—for me, the first time.  Not far from there, over the town line into Marlboro, was the spot where I saw his wife drive off the road four years earlier.  I was on my way to work at the Marlboro Hospital ER and she was headed to work someplace in the other direction.  We were both late; she fell asleep.  She had a big lump on her head, but otherwise she was OK.  I brought her to what I think was an old farmhouse, the stone wall of which she had repositioned with her car.  The old couple who lived there let her use their phone to call her father—she and Paul were already seperated, the first of many seperations their marriage would endure. 

As I looked down at the place of my birth from the cartographer's perspective, I revisited deeply memorized locations and places of fond experience.  I unearthed recollections which restored to me friends and loves, links with people which, having been abandoned by me long ago, have fallen to the ground like festive fall leaves, and returned to root.  But here I possess them still.  Now I pretend to stroke the loves who once long ago I was so afraid to touch.  Now I can kiss the young men, the ones who I suspected were wanting me to kiss them.  As the decades have passed, what was once a suspicion of their willingness has become a certainty.  Now, I simply cannot believe that I did not kiss Bob the day he brought me to that beach in Rhode Island.  I cannot believe I didn't kiss Dave that day up in my bedroom.  I can't explain why I thought it was always safer to be aloof and cold in the green leaf time of my youth when so many all around me exuded warmth and passion bubbling over. 

I revisited thousands of other moments from my youth and early adulthood in Northboro; as always the fondest recollections came first.  But inevitably the lesser memories began to emerge, those of embarrassment more easily forgotten than remembered.  This led finally to the poignant memories of fear, fear that made me run away when there was absolutely no reason to—except fear.  The memory of high school unhappiness, of trying to be invisible between classes in hallways that were filled like subway cars, of staring fixedly at the tile floor, all for fear of something unknown and inexpressible.  Remembering the fear always puts an end to the reminiscence. 

The opportunities of my past are gone, and remembering them is bittersweet.  But remembering the fear today still stops me cold. 

It is not gone.