Strange Sunday

When I lived in downtown Durham in the mid-aughts, there was a building I used to pass everyday on Gregson Street on my way to the Brightleaf District, a building I called Strange Sunday. It was a rather plain stuccoed building, at the time abandoned, but I used to stop and stare at the pill-like windows, fascinated. (It was the same feeling I used to get as a child in New Salem, North Dakota, when I would wander towards Main Street to stare at a series of amethyst-colored glass blocks that had been oddly cemented into a patch of sidewalk, filling my childhood brain with halting fascination.) I either pictured--or dreamt, nearly two decades later I'm not sure which--the door opening to a peach marbled foyer and a carved spiral staircase, next to which sat a tall vase with filled with coral-colored lilies. In writing this post I was dismayed to discover that my photographs of this building were among the thousands lost of my life in Trinity Park when I lived in near-abject poverty; my writings on this subject have also long-since disappeared. At the time--perhaps in my cynicism--I didn't think anyone would ever care about them, let alone care to read them; it's fitting, perhaps, that the Durham of 2023 that bears little resemblance to the city I loved when I was young should have taken with it records of a life once lived that I will never get back. 

I thought about the Strange Sunday building today for the the first time in years; I remember it as an old friend to whom I never got to say goodbye, in my present shock at the post-pandemic decimation of the Brightleaf District, it is something perhaps one day will no longer exist. One of the hardest parts of my new reality in recovery is that the places I often turned to to keep me grounded in the depths of my illness are no longer there. I no longer live in the apartment I called home for the years I often went to bed hungry and had only library books and a shortwave radio for entertainment on endless summer nights; they will most certainly be torn down someday, as will Strange Sunday. 

I miss the feeling of fascination. Of wonder. I miss dreams that were so vivid they were almost tangible; the feeling of cam in early spring, the smell of Asbury Methodist in long-forgotten rooms, the richness of carved wood, colors which scattered through stained glass windows down long corridors. It is still in Durham somewhere--somewhere lost among the façade of the Snow Building, flickering in the street lamps of the church yards on Trinity Avenue. I hope to find it again someday.