It happens like this.

One moment you are sixteen with wide eyes and no clue about the world, and the next you are standing on the precipice of life. And there is a kind of loss suffered there, a denial of everlasting innocence that both traps and sets you free.

There’s a photograph that I love by Nan Goldin titled “Dieter on the train, Sweden’’ (1984) that captures this beautifully. It depicts a man on a train, cigarette in hand, plunging his gaze into an unknown abyss. It’s the look on his face that pulls you in. It’s intimate, flushed in something raw and stinging that affects us all. It is one of ephemerality, of the fractured self looking back upon the whole, at something that has long gone away from him yet there he is still trying to decipher it, trying to understand things that happened far too long ago. Trying to make out a patch of familiarity, just one constant among the foreignness that now engulfs him. For he has been somewhere, experienced something in which he is trying to move away from but can still feel it all through the blur and motion of where he is now.

And so there is this great look of knowingness in his eyes that extends beyond the confines of the photograph and into my own life. The knowledge of how things are and of how they will never be again, for better or for worse.

I have been watching life out of a train window for the past year and half. Never quite able to make out a boundary between what was and what is, everything a blur of motion swirling around the stillness of me.

The train is the perpetual motion of the human experience, propelling you and I through time and space at velocities we cannot begin to comprehend. And one day that train came for me and it swallowed me whole into the vortex of my own fleeting adolescence. Memories came to me in fragments, in pieces broken off from what once was whole. I spent the better part of a year in a liminal state, stuck in time yet propelling right through it. And when I finally stepped off the train, when the air got still and the dust settled from the storm, I found myself worlds away from the place I left. And it was all so swift, so encompassing, that it brought me to my knees. This is how it has been for me.

I remember standing on top of an empty storage crate looking at the stars in the dead of winter with a boy I loved. I remember cold coastal winds blowing against my face, my friend propelling us through the night in a vintage green Mercedes that croaked classic rock into the streets. I remember cradling The Bell Jar my senior year of high school like Sylvia Plath was all that could save me, the metaphorical fig tree weighing heavy on my mind. I remember Jeanette Winterson, Colson Whitehead, and Patti Smith; how their prose became my scripture. I remember floating on my back in a pool, watching an endlessly blue sky lay herself out before me in such a silence that only the middle of July could know. I remember pressing bare feet to pink summer sidewalks. I remember walking around the city alone and never having felt more in love in all of my life than I did with those streets and everything they promised me. I remember lunches spent sitting on cracked pavement wishing I could grow up through the cement like a wildflower and escape the labyrinth of high school, of every place I never belonged. It was some kind of bad indie film, all of it, but it was mine.

And then it wasn’t.

For I was seventeen when the world stopped on its axis and I could not have told you which way was up or down or any which way around for months after.

Suddenly, all I knew was the sudden and severe fleetingness of my own adolescence. So these remembrances, these visions of yesteryear, they come to me in moments and in dreams. They are effervescent reminders that things are not as they were nor will they ever be again and that has been both the best and the worst thing I have ever had to learn.

Because most clearly, most unequivocally, it is apparent to me now that this is simply the lesson of any lifetime. That things are bound to break. That change is the only constant. That our great universal truth is one of wreckage and repair, of Rome falling and you learning to dance in the ruins, to dance in the wake of all the lives you could have led but left behind for another. And if I have learned anything from walking amidst the collapsed empire of my own adolescence, of love and friendship and the kind of loss that brings you to your knees, it is the bare necessity of learning to let go, to stop trying to cup water in your hands. Of being the man on the train, looking out at what is only moving further away from you while allowing yourself to embrace what is to come.

For one moment you are a child and the next you are going on twenty and it is all you can do to piece together an amalgamation of the experiences that carried you from here to there. You were there and now you are here. Everything, a memory. It happens like that.