I watched a woman pull into the driveway where I had my first car accident which involved a blue Ford van and a sideview mirror. Then she carried groceries into our old kitchen and I looked through the windows to see they’d had new cabinets installed. I wondered who lived in my old bedroom now, and if the BB gun hole was still in the window, shot there by the previous owners’ sons. I bet the woman in the driveway didn’t know they used to grow pot in the basement.

I don’t get down to Louisville that much anymore. Almost all of my high school friends have moved away, just like me. But it is one of the few cities in this country that has my memories seamlessly integrated into its edifices. I can’t drive down a road without triggering a memory. There’s the house where my best friend in 8th grade lived before her family moved somewhere only the army knows where. There’s the music store where I learned to play flute and met the man who plays the trumpet at the Kentucky Derby. There’s the pet store where I got a cuddly little guinea pig who used to rattle her cage to beg for lettuce.

But every time I drive across the bridge into Kentucky, I notice that the building with the curved top is not supposed to be there, though it was built years ago. The Vogue Theatre where I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show is now a clothing shop. The Hallmark store I visited to harass a friend during his work hours is now a tapas restaurant. The Winn-Dixie has been obliterated, replaced by a prefabricated, yuppy mall with roundabouts and cobblestones. They’ve widened Westport road. And the purple house at the end of our street, the one that lit up so bright during Christmas that I never missed the turn, has been painted a respectable taupe color and is missing its gaudy lawn ornaments. I think its owners moved away too.

I know the roads of this town, but I recognize the city less and less. I see so much that is no longer there. I guess cities are like people. They tear themselves down and build themselves up. They change without asking your permission. I will always remember my city the way it was, but now I see what it has become, and I have to accept it as it is.

It is kind of sad knowing these people’s futures, almost as sad as looking at what they’re wearing. Wow, a poncho. Really? But it can be happy too. Look, there’s Uncle Terry before he met his wife and made his beautiful babies. He’s got good times to look forward to. And there is Aunt Kelly the day she found out she had uterine cancer. She’ll be happy to find out they get it all during the hysterectomy. I wish I could tell Aunt Karen she will be so much happier after she divorces that man.

So many pictures. So many ways to remember the past. Take a picture today and remember it the way you want to.

Then she brought out the Charlie Brown glass.

“OMG!” I exclaimed, only I actually said “Oh my God” instead of shouting out the acronym, because even I am not that geeky. “We used to have glasses exactly like this! From McDonalds!”

“We also have a Smurfs glass from Burger King,” she said, showing me her Smurfs glass.

“Oh, we never went to Burger King. We were McDonalds people,” I said as I admired the glass. It was perfectly preserved, as if someone had reached into the china cabinet directly into 1984. Our McDonalds glasses took hundreds of trips through the dishwasher until their imagery was washed away along with the sticky soda residue at the bottom. We also had Muppets glasses that suffered a similar fate.

It was so bizarre, finding a piece of my childhood sitting in my friend’s boyfriend’s mother’s china cabinet. It triggered a memory I hadn’t known was sitting in my brain. It reminded me that yes, my past actually did happen. Here was proof, printed on glass and filled with tasty diet soda. It was as though a fragment of the 1980′s had fallen through a wormhole and was now appearing in the present even though it didn’t belong there.

This type of thing hadn’t happened since…a week ago at La Hacienda when they served us salsa in a bowl just like our old wooden kitchen bowls. These were bowls we threw out because the laminated, molded, wood started to splinter, and you don’t want to get a splinter in your tongue. On that memory, I only had one chip of salsa. Before that, I hadn’t had a flashback triggered by a physical object since I’d walked through the Rathskeller’s dining room, furnished with our old dining room chairs. I didn’t want to steal the chairs or the splintery wooden bowl, but I wanted to steal the glass, the cheap, McDonalds branded glass. I kept my kleptomaniac urges to myself though, and instead gushed over the dinnerware.

“You are so easily amused,” my friend said. Yes, I am. It makes life so much more delightful.

Then I went back and read some of my blog entries and realized that’s a load of crap.

I’ve always had issues with eating on the weekends. I’ve always eaten too many M&M’s at baby showers. Food has always been an issue for me – when I was fat, when I was losing weight, and now as I am maintaining my loss. Yet, for some reason, I make myself believe that I was more perfect in the past, that I was better back then, when my blog stands as proof otherwise. The human brain is tricky like that, remembering things as we think they were instead of how they actually were.

That’s one of the best things about keeping a journal, it’s immune to the shadings of time. The best way to know what it’s like to go through an experience is to write about it as it’s happening so your brain doesn’t play tricks on you later. When I’ve rooted through boxes in my closets, I’ve occasionally found diaries or old school journals. Usually I find myself reading them as I sit cross-legged on the floor thinking, “Wow, I was a total doofus!” The thoughts I had back then, the things that were important, are not the same as now. But I would never remember how different I was unless I’d written it down to read later. And I’d probably never realize how much the same I am in other ways either. That girl I think I was never really existed.

So, when I’m trying to fight off the urge to eat another granola bar and wondering why I’m so weak-willed lately, I can console myself with the fact that I’ve always been weak-willed. Thank goodness I took the time to write it down.

Mr. Gatti’s is a southeastern chain of pizza restaurants, so those of you who don’t have a drawl probably haven’t eaten there or even heard of the place. I lived in Louisville, Kentucky during my middle school and high school years. During field trips our school bus would pull up into their parking lot and dump a hundred hungry teenagers into their dining room with the large projection TV screen. We’d line up at the front register and pay our $6.00 for the buffet and then walk past the sneeze guard grabbing slices of whatever we wanted. This was easier than stopping at McDonalds because we could just grab food and go sit down instead of waiting at a register for personalized orders to be served on plastic trays.

When I think of Mr. Gatti’s, I don’t think so much about their pizza or all the times I went back for way too many helpings of cinnamon sticks. I think about that time in my life. I remember celebrating an academic tournament win in their dark dining room. I remember escaping molded plastic chairs in classrooms if only for a day. I remember being a kid. It reminds me of Louisville. It doesn’t matter that the pepperoni pizza was forgettable. I have other memories tossed into their pizza dough. I want to go back there so I can eat the memories.

As an insightful little copy editor says on their website, “When pizza is made right, it is joy in the round. It is a social experience just waiting to happen.” I never went to Mr. Gatti’s except on special occasions, which is why it has a special little spot in my head. It’s odd that the thought of a simple little restaurant chain can do all that.

Anybody else have food like this?

It’s undeniable though that all the fat girl stuff has become less and less a part of my daily reality. I don’t have to worry about fitting behind the steering wheel of my car anymore. I don’t have to shop in the plus-size section. I fit in movie theatre seats just fine. And it’s awesome. It rocks just as much as I thought it would. It’s also making it harder and harder for me to relate to a fat person’s reality, just like it’s harder for me to relate to the life of a fifth grader because I graduated from elementary school in the early 90′s. We didn’t even have the Internet back then. How could I have lived without the Internet? When I read posts on the fat positive web sites complaining about discrimination and dirty looks, I still agree with their fat positive stances, but I find it harder and harder to get personally riled up about it. I still support fat rights, but my anger appears to be waning.

But I still have my memories, and I find myself comparing my current life to my old life every day. Whenever I cross my legs, I remember not being able to do that when my thighs were the size of Crisco cans. Every day when I walk up to my fourth floor office, I am awed by the fact that I don’t have to stop on the landings to catch my breath. When I was riding the bus in Chicago, I sat across from a morbidly obese woman in a cotton summer dress who took up one and a half seats. Every time someone swiped their bus pass and stepped down the aisle I was relieved that it wasn’t me they obviously avoided sitting next to.

So I definitely remember. It’s there. Every. Single. Day.

When I was driving with my mother to Louisville for my brother’s wedding, we started talking about photos. I mentioned that I was trying to find a really good “before” picture that showed my full body, but wasn’t one of the “blah” looking ones I use in my rotating progress photos. Problem was there really aren’t that many photos of my full body from those days.

“I think we avoided taking pictures of your entire body, didn’t we?” she asked.

As she said that I suddenly felt an irresistible urge to examine the intricate pattern of bug splatter on the windshield or the corn fields flying by at 70 miles per hour. I felt uncomfortable in the front seat of that car, but it was no longer because my seatbelt didn’t fit. I don’t know exactly what I felt. It was a cocktail of shame and sadness, shaken in my sub-conscious but its complete contents unknown, just like that strange vodka and cranberry concoction the bartender served me at the reception. But feeling like that made me realize what’s been missing from my fat girl issues these days.

I don’t have to feel them anymore.

I remember that I felt ashamed that I was so fat that I couldn’t by pants at Lane Bryant. I remember that I avoided seeing friends from high school because I was scared of what they’d think of my weight gain. I remember feeling depressed that I’d let my problem get so far out of control. But remembering a feeling isn’t quite the same as feeling it. Otherwise, you could have amazing sex just one time and be able to play back the orgasms in your mind during boring meetings. If you felt depressed that you didn’t get an iPod for your birthday, you could just re-feel the joy of getting a bike for Christmas as a child and you’d feel fine. It’s too bad life doesn’t work like that.

I’m not completely immune to those old feelings though. I certainly felt uncomfortable when my mom brought up the fact that I used to hide from cameras. As I’ve been writing my book I’ve had to write up my fat girl horror stories. I’ve had to relive and analyze some miserable shit and it’s been completely draining. I could only work on those early chapters for an hour or two before I shut down Microsoft Word to do something happier, like kicking puppies. I can still empathize with my old self and feel a fraction of what she felt, but reliving shopping trips from hell in 12pt font isn’t as powerful as experiencing it live and in color, here and now.

So I can look at that fat lady on the bus and I can remember what it was like to avoid eye contact with people coming up the bus steps. I can remember praying that the bus wouldn’t fill up and someone wouldn’t be left standing in the aisle clinging to a metal bar because I was too fat to sit next to. But I don’t have to feel that anymore. I’ve gotten off that bus and I hope my pass has expired forever.

I never want to become a smug thin person. I don’t want to become judgmental of fat people or to patronize them. It’s always possible I could become a fat person again myself. It’s important to remember how hard it can be to be fat and how hard it can be to lose weight. It’s important to understand what other people are going through. If we all understood each other better maybe there wouldn’t be any collapsing skyscrapers or exploding subway trains.

So I will always remember what it felt like to ride that bus, but I don’t have to feel the hard plastic seats beneath me anymore. I got off at my stop, but I’ll remember the trip and I’ve still got my ticket stub. Maybe that’s the best I can do.