I drove down to Lexington, Kentucky this morning. It's a relatively short drive, about 90 minutes or so, and it ends in the middle of the rolling green Kentucky hills and the white fences of horse farms. And this morning was somewhat misty and cloudy, giving a mystique to the already idyllic scene.
I remember the first time I took this drive over 9 years ago. I had just finished my undergraduate degree and had been planning to stay in Cincinnati playing with the undergraduate string quartet I enjoyed, working my dream job as a shelver in the Art and Music Department at the Cincinnati Public Library, and living with my boyfriend at the time and our three cats. Life was good, perfect, and settled. I had always lived in Cincinnati and always, especially with all my high school international friends, dreamed of living somewhere else. And then one day in June, I responded to an opportunity to play in a string quartet at the University of Kentucky and as a section cellist at the Lexington Philharmonic as part of a graduate assistantship. All it took was a few days of ennui at work and a questioning of life's direction to make me put together my application materials and send it in late June.
The recording, materials, and recommendations were good enough for acceptance. And so one Saturday I found myself in a car with my father, heading down the highway to an exotic future in a foreign place–Kentucky! I had a taste of it that day–the rolling green hills, the quiet campus, the unhurried southern attitude, the brick buildings from the 18th and early 19th centuries. We looked at apartment yard signs, and a few weeks later, with my newly acquired driver's license, I was heading down the highway alone, in a packed car, moving into my first apartment and my first night living in a place that wasn't Cincinnati.
So much has happened since then. There is nothing left of my life prior to moving to Lexington, or of the subsequent one that I discovered there, save of my memories and what it has built inside me. I drove through today, feeling a different exoskeleton riding around me, one that I had shed years ago. I saw the buildings of an exotic future from another side of time. I remembered walking certain streets, remembered thoughts and decisions I had had at specific moments in time at certain traffic intersections. And where had they taken me?
Somehow here. Seeing "60 miles to...." on a highway sign has such a different feeling after seeing "3, 545 miles to...." on an airplane monitor. What once was such an adventure, a daring embarkation to a new life, now seems like just a step to being where I've been and where I am. And yet there is something so uniquely special about Lexington which no other life I've had or will have can ever touch. There is something very special to me about the space and the way that time moves there, and something very special to me about the people that I knew, and the people that I still know that live there. And it remains as exotic and untouchable, unknowable as the future, as it ever was. It's not something I can wrap my arms around, it's not something I can take with me, or even something of which I can take an accurate picture. And so it's very special to be able to take a day to reopen it, even for just a lunch with friends, just a drive through the streets that once held a different connotation, just to hold it again before letting go, again.
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