The Warehouse

I wonder if all the memories live somewhere besides in our heads. We make a big enough deal about the. I think I stumbled into someone else’s the other day in Roanoke.

Shenandoah Ave runs next to the Norfolk Southern tracks, racing the trains on the mainline as they both skirt a massive yard, express lanes through traffic. Trains, like drivers, don’t want to get stuck. Some covered hoppers look like they’ve been sitting there for years on the weedy side track.

Cars and trains roll towards the blue west. The road lifts up. The mountains offer a momentary glimpse of transcendence before the road plunges back into the warehouses and broken down churches. Modern runes painted propaganda rainbow–slogans of community–try to summon utopia on the cracked asphalt.

There are no faces.

(There never are.)

The midday hush falls squarely on my car. People are inside, trains are outstanding. Two hundred and fifty miles from the ocean, a sea breeze drifts in my open window.

A cry of a gull or what 1948 must have looked like seem to glimmer on the edge of sight, with no business being there.

What if all the memories were stored in a warehouse? Surely it would be a large place, and no matter how carefully boxed, nostalgia would leak out. I’d imagine I’d catch wafts of the ocean, tinkles of laughter, the floor shaking slightly as an escaped roller coaster shook the next row.

The wars and stood up dates and broken dishes would be kept down on level 13 below, but here, in the sunshine, are humanity’s good days, archived.

Check out 143a for love at first sight. 797, row C is where they keep the records of card games won at Thanksgiving, and the trip to the fifth floor is always worth it to catch the scent of grandma’s cookies.

I’m not sure where this warehouse is, and it’s purely imagination.

Then again, so are memories.

Or are they?

The signal by the tracks blinked to green, clearing the way for a train to head toward that blue west. I rolled on, past the sun-bleached posters of the shampoo models and the vape stores.

I heard a cicada singing for the first time this year yesterday as I watered the geranium on my new front porch. He sang of a thread going back as far as I can remember, and then a bit more.

If the warehouse of memories had a radio ad, surely it would be the sound of a cicada, the arrival of summer, timeless.