“...you should leave too... you should leave too... you should leave too...
Amy heard Sue’s voice as clear as if she had been standing right there right then instead of three years before.
A mother, father, and young son walked through the gate and then paused, the father with the camera and the mother and son posing.
“Here, let me take a picture of all three of you,” she said to the father. He was genuinely gracious and joined his wife after saying to Amy “It’s this button. Just press. The flash is automatic.”
Amy looked at the family and the gate and the street behind them and the rooftops of the village behind them. This photo might live well beyond her, maybe the family. It might become the trigger for stories and laughs and memories. It was certainly proof of existence in a place at a time. She made sure it was framed well and focused sharp.
She watched the family walk away. Did the city give life or take it? Did it inspire or suffocate? It was something she and Sue had great debates over up until the last time they saw each other. By that time Amy had decided she needed a job and was confident the state bureaucracy could absorb one more and so left the city a week after Sue.
Amy turned slowly around, full circle. Her eyes were memory-cameras recording all she saw for later recall, and then she walked back through the gates, into the city. She strolled until after ten, stopping to have a sandwich at Janie’s Cafe, a new place, like so many that pop-up for two or three years and then go under. The fixtures and furnishings sit silently until the next person who has always dreamed of running a little cafe comes along for his turn.
After dinner she walked the little winding streets of the old city, in no particular order, in no particular direction. The refrain she played over and over were of past moments.
“That’s where I last saw Pam,” she’d think. “We had a drink after seeing that play and then the next day she left for that place. Back home?”
On another corner she remembered that there was a colonial Spanish military hospital there where a shipwrecked British captain killed himself rather than have his leg amputated by Spanish doctors.
On another corner Theodore Roosevelt spent the night in a hotel that burned less than a week after his visit, taking with it most of the city clock.
Every spot had a reason for being there. No space was without a time when it had been of special importance, securing for it a place in time.