Yesterday afternoon, on the rooftop, I had a bout of what I call time-sickness. This building is not a high rise, but it’s on the crest of the hill. Streets I used to walk every day are visible from here as gullies and canyons in the distance. They tugged at me.

I wanted the impossible. I wanted more than just to be on those streets again, walking in the sunlight, passing familiar places — the old Uomo store where Dad bought Mom a leather jacket back in the ’90s, just because she saw it in the window and liked it — the noodle shop that disappointed me with its gristly chunks of chicken — the high end European candy shop with its window full of foil-wrapped, molded chocolates in the shapes of Santas at Christmastime, rabbits at Easter, pumpkins at Halloween — The glassy Apple store that always reminded me of an ant-farm with its three stories and stairways and all those moving human figures visible from across the street — the bar/art gallery next to the entrance of the library, the DADA with its delicious Sazeracs, its constantly shifting paintings, its massive permanent sculpture of a pair of opalescent wings made from computer motherboards.

I wanted to walk past these places with a freedom and assumption of safety that I don’t think I will ever feel again.

The last time I walked through downtown was when I went home at about sunset on the Friday we learned the library would close. I’d assumed that Laura and I would be back in the office on Monday as part of a skeleton crew doing some last-minute housekeeping before the building truly closed. By Sunday evening, though, it was plain we weren’t going downtown any time soon. I didn’t get to say goodbye to the city I knew. When I finally get to walk past those places again, I wonder which old friends will be unlit and empty.

Maybe that’s why last night I rediscovered another old friend, a book I’d read in my twenties. Over the summer I spent overseas as a college student, I binged on Mary Renault’s work, starting with The Persian Boy, and then tearing through her whole ancient world series. It seemed her paperbacks were the main English language fiction on sale in Europe back then, especially in Italy and Greece.

The Mask of Apollo was my favorite, an historical novel set in ancient Greece disguised as a chatty, bitchy, name-dropping memoir by a famous actor, the fictional Nikoratos. Reading its first pages again on Amazon made me want it again. Unlike many books I revisit from my youth, this one had aged well, drew me in. I think it will do me good to spend more time with Niko, his wit, his insights, the perfectly captured, badly disguised vanity of a successful actor who, even as he describes historic events and great men, can’t resist sliding in a few humble mentions of the applause he enjoyed, the compliments he received. If anyone can reconcile me to the reality of growing older and seeing the world I knew fall away forever, it’s him.