By Amanda Knox

In middle school I was instructed on how to construct a physical timeline of my life so far using beads, shells, trinkets, and yarn. On one end of a single line of yarn I knotted a great, glassy, purple bead that represented my birth. A couple inches down the line I knotted a similar, pink bead that represented the birth of my sister, Deanna. A few more inches down, a small, plastic, blue bead designated my first day of kindergarten. And so on.

It was up to me to decide what happenings in my life deserved recognition. For instance, I didn’t mark my parents’ divorce—with a dramatic black feather, say—because I had no memory of their marriage, and it in no way seemed relevant to my life. I did mark—with a gold-colored charm-bracelet star—the miraculous goal I kicked all the way from the half-line when I was twelve. Only some inches past that, the line dangled bare—my future.

It was a good lesson, encouraging me to begin to think about myself as an accumulation of experiences, but time went along and I did not continue the project. A string of yarn adorned with trinkets was inadequate, too much a simplification.

I read recently, “We are all more like vast subterranean caverns, uncharted even by ourselves, than we are like holes dug straight into the ground.” (Timothy Snyder in the foreword of Tony Judt’s Thinking the Twentieth Century) The single line of yarn was like a hole dug straight into the ground, one bead along the line of yarn like one shovel-full after the other. This is how we experience the present moment along the timeline, yes, but this is not how a person processes experience. Like a vast subterranean cavern with tunnels and chasms and chambers that wind around, fall up fall down, and reroute into each other, so does a person rediscover and redefine their memories the farther along the timeline they travel. You never fall in love the way you first fell in love.

But the act of falling in love, in particular, makes me think that the undiscovered/rediscovered vastness of the cavern is also an inadequate comparison to a person’s inner world as it is built upon by the accumulation of experience. Who was it who spoke of the cityscape of Rome existing timelessly, or rather, timefully—as a metaphysical conglomeration of all of its time, the Byzantine and Roman constructions at their height in the same place as their ruins, in the same place as the modern constructions that took their place?

I have been in love only a few times, and I’ve never fallen in love the way I first fell in love. That much everyone tends to agree on. But I would posit another: that the love a person feels for a particular romantic partner and romantic relationship is like a cathedral or a colosseum on the streets of a person’s inner cityscape. Winding landscape gives way to streets that flow in and out of each other in the direction of this monument in the way that a person’s intentions, emotions, and energy are steered towards their beloved. And when, because of faulty foundation or cultural evolution, that monumental relationship should crumble or fall out of favor, then a person’s inner cityscape will change, will build up new monuments, reroute and reuse old pathways, deepen and expand in new directions.

The cathedral, the colosseum, will remain, as much a ghost as an homage of itself at its height. The beloved, and the love a person feels for their beloved, remains, changed, no longer trafficked like it was, but a monument around which a person may continue to pave, plant, build, better, tread.