Of all the sense memories to float to the surface, I was surprised to wake up the other morning suddenly aware of something from a quarter century ago: sitting on a coach at Glasgow Bus Station, preparing to travel back to Aberdeen for… work? A visit with friends? I can’t remember which, exactly; I know for a fact it wasn’t one of the times I was going back to go to school, because of everything else that is happening in the memory: me sitting in the seat, eagerly unwrapping and opening a copy of DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths collected edition hardcover.
(I just checked; that came out in 2000, so it really was 25 years ago exactly. I must have been going up to Aberdeen to visit friends.)
It’s not the book itself that’s the center of the memory as much as my feelings surrounding it. This was an expensive book — a slipcased hardcover that came with, I think, a poster and maybe something else as well? — and it was by far the most expensive book I’d ever bought for myself brand new by that point in my life. I was very conscious of the fact that I had just spent that amount of money on myself for something that I did not by any measure “need,” and it felt luxuriant in a way that I was so uncomfortable with that I was practically vibrating in the seat as I unwrapped it.
That’s not to say that it was “bad” discomfort as much as it was simply novel discomfort. I felt accomplished and adult to be able to spend this amount of money on just a book, and it felt like a strange benchmark that I had passed by buying it. I remember thinking to myself that it wasn’t just a book but an object that I would always take care of and treasure forever — a four color piece of evidence that I had passed into a particular phase of adulthood.
I was sincere in that at the time, but when I left the country two years later, it was one of many things I left behind. Looking back now, I find myself strangely sad about that. Chalk it up to middle aged nostalgia, I guess.