strawberry fields
I ventured to Strawberry Fields on the first day that felt like spring,
knowing that it would feel different through the lens of truth,
finally awakened from my daydream of tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
I sit down on a park bench to take it all in
and compartmentalize the music into my own moments.
I think of autumn drives with my grandpa, the burnt orange leaves reflecting off of the Woodcliff Lake Reservoir, shimmering in the distance
the first of many childhood landmarks,
eight days a week, running loops around Wood Dale park,
my grandpa in the gazebo watching me, a toddler in pigtails, playfully chasing geese through the muddy grass.
And then I’m a teenager, growing up in the age of iPod Nanos and LimeWire, discovering his record collection with the excitement of an anthropologist studying a lost culture.
I dust off the discs and spin the vinyl,
I learn the a-sides and love the b-sides,
Do I have to pick a side?
Heartache creeps in as my memories fast-forward to those last days in the hospital, holding my grandpa’s frail hands,
If only for a moment, “Let it Be” masks the monitors and the music of mortality that plays over and over,
until the trauma distorts your memory or negates it to nothingness.
I try to make sense of my confusion and find clarity in the dissonance,
the magnetism of Strawberry Fields diminishing with the reality of Lennon’s abuse,
the once bright flowers now lying lifeless on the mosaic tiles,
faded and tired of commemorating a culture that condones those who hurt whom they love,
to keep whom they love close.
Visiting Strawberry Fields reminds me how memorials mend the living more than they commemorate the people we have lost,
and that it is not the memorial that eases our grief, but the memories we celebrate here that heal our hearts,
which is why I hold those close and keep the cemetery far.
I try to release my guilt by separating the art from the artist,
hoping to get my Strawberry Fields closure, forever,
finding grace in the realization that Lennon isn’t my artist,
knowing that my artist lives in my memories, where I can feel his presence the most,
and as if a sign that closure is imminent,
the man next to me swigs from a soggy paper bag, drunken and disheveled,
singing his rendition of “Imagine,”
his voice out of tune.
