today, on the way to my parents’ place, i drove past jeff’s house.  i used to stay over at jeff’s house.  when he was out of town on business, i would curl up alone on the couch and fall asleep watching pay-per-view movies.  when he was home, we would cook dinner and sit in front of the fire with mixed drinks and books.  it’s been more than two years since we went out, and when i last talked to him a year ago he told me that he was married, and that he and his wife had a son from her previous marriage.  as i drove past, i saw a three-foot-high plastic basketball goal in the driveway.

i’d only been inside rodrigo’s house once.  rodrigo was the jazz choir guitarist our senior year of high school.  he was in a mariachi band, too, and he always wore black boots and a black leather jacket.  rodrigo was obsessed with stevie ray vaughan, and i was obsessed with rodrigo.  when we had to watch the candidate for government class, he had the only copy checked out of the local video store.  i went to his house to borrow it, and he answered the door almost immediately, already holding the videotape in his hand.  i don’t know how i’d expected the inside of his house to look, but i hadn’t expected it to look so normal.  the house is painted a different color now, the plywood holiday decorations his mom would always put outside conspicuously absent.

i drove past jean’s house, too, even though she hasn’t lived there in five years.  she was my best friend in early high school, and we would lay on the floor in her bedroom (the rightmost window, there at the front), reading magazines and listening to her cds.  unlike my parents, jean’s parents loved it when her friends came over, so on any given weekend there would be five to ten of us in her living room, in her kitchen, doing cartwheels on her front lawn near the giant rock by the mailbox.  the giant rock is no longer there, and the lawn is unkempt now, with long grass and layers of fallen leaves.

what happens to the used-up paraphernalia of former places?  where does the new paraphernalia come from?  have i left a me-shaped indentation in the former versions of my existence?