It Never Really Goes Away

I hopped on the subway to go to a show tonight, and when the doors opened at my stop, and I saw the station scenery that I'd seen for close to twenty years traveling to ABC, I gasped, literally gasped. It was a reaction so visceral, so unexpected. "Wow," I thought in that moment, "it really doesn't go away."
 
I haven't worked at ABC in almost three years. Since my time traveling to that station, I have commuted to Connecticut, traveled to assorted edit houses all over the city, and recently enjoyed an on-foot commute. Perhaps each of these is ingrained enough in me that I could do it again without thinking too much. Yet none of them is ingrained enough in me to send me reeling years later.
 
There are so many days when I am amazed at the degree to which I have moved on, at the degree to which my life is so separate from all the years that led up to it. And yet, in an instant, it all comes back--the crack of dawn days when that train station was empty, and the start-of-school time days, when it was jam-packed with teenagers. The early in my career days when I carried tokens, and the more recent days when I stopped to refill my MetroCard. The days when I bounded up the stairs, excited about a day of production, and the days when I trudged up, dreading a day filled with too much drama.
 
No matter how much we think we've moved on, when something has been so much a part of us for so long, it never really goes away. It doesn't mean we have to live in the past. It just means we have to appreciate the gasp once in a while--the flooding back of memories in a life that often only seems to move forward.
 
As I stepped off the train, I was struck by "it doesn't go away." I gasped. And then I smiled. Because as far removed as it all might be, it feels good to know that it never really goes away.