Inside Providence

There is always a lingering fear that what I remember of the past, what my memories convince myself of, do not exist. I’ve fooled myself plenty of times that the past, and even for that matter the present, cannot be seen with absolute certainty. Somewhere, back there, memories are often distorted, made into a false, and much more rosy story. Do I do this to cope with a past that in its experience was all too challenging? Or do I do this because it is so much harder to remember everything of the past and that, for some reason (likely luck) my thoughts are geared toward the warmer tones of the past? Likely the answer is both.

When I left Rhode Island in 2018 I remember telling people three things of which I was, and still am, certain — that I was glad to be back in California, that I love Providence and could see myself there again, and that my second or third favorite beach on the planet is just outside Jamestown, Rhode Island. All of these things, some eight years later, are in no doubt today true. They seem to be facts that my recollections of the past can stand on, can hold to now without fear that I made it up. But that wasn’t so until this past August, when I was back on the east coast for my friend Rachael’s wedding.

I looked forward to returning to Providence, to see the old restaurant I worked at, visit one of my most treasured used book stores, Paper Nautilus, and get a sense of the place again. Had it grown or diminished in my imagination as I had feared?

Arriving on the Amtrak train from Westerly, Rhode Island, stepping out to the already hot and humid morning air it seemed as though little had changed. I walked downtown and stopped at Bolt coffee, beside the old restaurant I used to work at, Figidini. The cafe, not Bolt coffee, was new to me, having moved from their small hotel lobby space into this old bakery spot. Sitting at the cafe in downtown, yes it felt new, but the core feeling of Providence was still present — the kind yet rough face of the city, an image built by a vital confidence of everyday working people mixed in with the academics and artistic intellectuals of Brown and RISD just up the street on the hills of the east side.

Leaving the cafe I walked over to the west side to meet up with my old roommate, Alex, at his apartment. I dropped off my things and we headed out to the city — Alex to get things to make eggplant parmesan later, and I to wander. We split ways as I crossed the river and began popping in and out of the places on the east side where I frequented for the single year I lived there. Arriving on the college thoroughfare, Thayer Street, I saw Tealuxe, where Rachael, Grace, and Ava worked until its closure years ago, the windows covered by butcher paper, still and empty.

Walking up the hill looking for something to eat, I stopped at the gyro spot, Pockets, a place I always admired for their speed of service, and the immaculate stations where they cooked and served the food, always looking as though they had just opened, not finally finished a hundred person rush. I ordered my falafel and gyro and sat down.

Sitting in the sterile air conditioned spot eating falafel, looking at the students and workers coming in for their lunch, I quietly remembered how I often felt so lost living here — how alone I believed myself to be back then, out of place in this peculiar New England city. There were moments, many really, of good times, but mostly, I remembered then, how I just wanted to be back in California. I even almost backed out of our lease entirely to go back home — but was, as I see it now, luckily convinced to stay. There was a loss, a sore and healing wound of grief I was working through at the time, and all I really wanted then was to be home, be around a long personal history and the comfort of an all too familiar world. But instead I was in a new city, with a culture I could only grasp at understanding. Returning, I was seeing that, maybe, Providence wasn’t the easiest place for me at that time in my life.

I had forgotten all of this. I had supplanted it with nothing save all the good memories. Maybe it was the taste of the dry falafel, or the sight of old restaurants and stores made for teenagers playing at adulthood on this street, but the memory of that feeling returned — the beauty of the place and the remembrance of that solitude that held me there, desperate for California. The loneliness had really been here but was not something I wanted to hold onto in my memories of my time there. I let it slip away, rewrote it to be a beautiful history as I wished I had respected it as such back then.

Today, however, as I’m more able to work with and assuage my own feelings, I do believe those happier memories of Rhode Island. Yes, it was a rough time, and the struggle with my own feelings around that time blanketed over me, but that blanket only served as a means to neglect the better aspects of my life outside, there and then. Because I did get stoned in the woods with my friends. We made music, music videos, wrote, wandered the city, explored the state. I left the restaurant and worked as a state park naturalist. I met kind people in Lincoln, Rhode Island, like my pen pal Nancy. The good was there and though I tried to convince myself at the time of how rough it was, the joy of that time couldn’t be lost through the years.

How I structured those memories before going back to Providence was really a fiction of my time there — that I was completely and totally happy, which has never been wholly true for any era of my life so far. And yet, that fiction didn’t spread to the city itself. While I neglected that sadness, that longing to be back in California and the exhaustion of that far flung feeling, returning to Providence wasn’t a shock — it just felt like returning to Providence. My love for it, and my memories of living there didn’t reshape the image of the city itself. In fact, it hadn’t changed at all. And so, maybe my memory does serve me well at times.

That day, after walking all over the city (which is totally possible in Providence), Alex, Grace, Rachael, and I hung out at Alex’s apartment. Alex shared wine, served us the eggplant parm he made, and we talked. We caught up after Rachael’s wedding, rambled, shared the gossip of our lives. I remembered the place where Rachael, Alex, Matt, Katherine, and I lived back then. How Alex loved to cook large meals for us, how he and I would go to the wine shop to try to make sense of different wines, how we’d all get stoned and watch Sailor Moon or Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

Sitting with Alex, Grace, and Rachael that night I felt like we were back there, sitting in our strange duplex on Angell street, smoking and laughing, rambling, with nothing much to do. I could feel there, in Alex’s apartment that night sharing a rare moment together, how our lives have and haven’t changed, and how our affections and admiration seemed so unwavering. We still, after all this time passed, care so much for each other. And now, more than the last time I left Providence and my east coast homies, I miss both even more.

buy me a coffee :)