At eighteen, I find myself faced with changes in my life. One of the most common questions my friends and family never fail to ask me when I come home is this: "Have you changed any?" I like to think that this is a question that only they, not I, can answer--although any change, no matter how minuscule, is inevitable. Times pass, faces fade from memory.
Several weeks ago, my increasing wonder in whether or not I had really changed collided with an art gallery exhibit on campus. In this exhibit, artist Tim Youd retyped entire novels, by typewriter, on just a couple sheets of paper. Naturally, the pages on display were crumbled and warped from the heavy ink and repeated typing, but I recall staring at one page and through the ink, I could see jumbled typed words that read, "The room had been a ballroom once."
I do not remember what novel the artist had retyped on this particular page, but I recall immediately thinking of an old store in West Virginia named WHIPPLE CO. STORE. Located at the heart of an abandoned coal town known as Whipple, the store once served as the social hub for the townspeople when Whipple had thrived in the early 20th-century era of industry. The second floor of Whipple Co. Store had really been a ballroom once--the wealthy upperclass citizens would gather in the exclusive, lavish room on weekend nights to dance. As decades passed however, the ballroom, along with the majority of the town and its inhabitants, slowly dissipated into black-and-white photographs and pages of regional history.
Someday, our memories, too, will slip into the past. Someday, we will no longer be young college students, floating between adolescence and adulthood, striving for our own identities in this world. Whether Saturday night finds us swing dancing in the extravagant attic of a general store, or grinding to the beat of a deafening bass in the darkness of a fraternity basement, we cannot escape the endless shifting and shaping of life. Eras change, places change, and we change. The cycle never ceases.
WHIPPLE CO. STORE
The room had been a ballroom once.
These attic boards beneath your boots once were not rotting,
But were built like bones to support the racing hearts of the elite
And orchestras piping of laughter—
The swaying of lace skirts and tap-tap-click-clapping of slick black heels
Grazing the polished floor that is now covered in dust that is
Stirred by your breath, even though you forget to exhale.
Instead, you press your lips together and you pull the musty air into your nostrils,
Sniffing for some faint trace of gardenia perfume or acidic shoe polish.
You press your fingers to the glass behind you and carve a question mark into your reflection—
Windows that no longer open to stars that glimmered in the year 1918—
Floating lights that have long burnt out before granting lovers their wishes.
Evelyn says that eighteen is an exceptional time to reinvent oneself.
The novels she quoted as a child now are shoved beneath her bed—
Beneath her bed, a graveyard of fictional characters who were never meant to die
And crumbled up papers that contain scribbled poetry to serve as their tombstones.
Evelyn suddenly says that she is an extravert.
Her solace comes from others
Because she can no longer find it within herself.
She presses her flesh into a bra-lette and denim miniskirt and swears that she shivers
Only until the vodka saturates the pit of her shriveled stomach—
Pounding, stepping, tap-tap-click-clap on beat to the RNB that she detested in middle school
In an overcrowded room that, this afternoon, was an empty basement.
Floor becomes a puddle of sweat and vomit and she does not breathe
And she smiles.
The orchestra pipes on.
Laughter does not sweep away the dirt
From otherwise easy, friendly conversation
But is the dust itself that shimmers and falls over what is vacant and forgotten.
She stares at her refection and is greeted only with a question.
They ask you to dance.
You decline, say the song is not your style,
And are left drowning in the dark slosh splashing in the punch bowl.
You say tomorrow is another night—
More stars that will twirl around your brain
Before spinning off into nothing.
