My husband and I recently stopped into the new Waymark Hotel, formerly the Chattanooga Bank Building, on the corner of Market and Eighth Street. When I was in my thirties, I had a pottery studio on the seventh floor, and my husband had an internet bookstore one flight up.

At the time, the Bank Building was home to all manner of businesses, including law offices, a social worker, a computer company, an investment firm, other artists, and us. The spaces were large—my pottery studio was over 700 square feet, and had four enormous windows that looked out over the city. There were elegant touches throughout—brass elevator doors, marble walls and tile floors—but there were also spaces stripped down to the load-bearing walls and with cracked windows and no heat or air. Overall, the building was functional, but like my husband and me, who’d fled our nine-to-five office jobs to find more fulfilling work, it was in need of a transformation.

Now the lobby has a front desk, and sofas and tables with stacks of fat art books. The offices and art studios have been made over into hotel rooms. On the roof is a bar, called Iris, with a view of Lookout Mountain to the west and the ridge cut and beyond to the east. It was hard not to gape as we walked through, hard not to announce that we were the building’s early inhabitants.

After a drink at Iris, we made three stops. First we rode the elevator down to eight, and looked at the end of the hall where my husband’s bookstore, CityBooks, had occupied the whole south wing. The space that once housed 10,000 rare and used books was now a large suite of rooms. Then we stopped on the seventh floor and snapped a photo of me in front of the door to my old pottery workspace, Barking Horse Studio.

I tried to remember how it felt to be in my thirties and starting a business: the shimmer of possibility, the glow of excitement tinged with a thrumming fear of failure, the skip in my heart when I considered that I’d quit my safe job to bet on life as an artist, because to not do it felt like death. This was before I understood that life was cyclical, that some things would work out but others wouldn’t, and that, in time, other things wouldn’t work out while others would. This was back when I thought the world was more rigid than it is, and that I exercised more control than I did.

But I couldn’t recapture the feeling. I lost my mom to Alzheimer’s at the start of the summer. My little old poodle, Zayde, was in failing health, and I knew what was coming. Try as I might, I couldn’t reach back because I’m no longer that person; I could only access the echo of who I had been.

Our last stop before leaving the Waymark was the basement. This was where, thirty years ago, the persistently malfunctioning elevator invariably took us every morning before taking us up to our respective floors. On this evening, the doors yawned open to reveal not the dark recesses of the underbelly of the building, but the soft light of a speakeasy dotted with patrons, the sound of tinkling glasses, and bright, jazzy music.

We rode back up to the lobby and took one last look around on our way out. We saw where the old Daryl’s sandwich shop had been, remembered the many turkey sandwiches bought there and carried upstairs to eat at our desks. We looked at the front entrance doors and remembered all the times we’d burst through them in the mornings, fresh from our long walk from the parking garage, eager to get to our art, to our books. And then we left.

A day later, I realized I’d left my new sunglasses at the rooftop bar. It would have been easy enough to go back for them. But I didn’t. I like the idea of them being there. It’s fitting, I think, to have left behind something of who I am now to keep company with who I used to be.

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Dana Shavin is an award-winning humor columnist for the Chattanooga Times Free Press, the author of a memoir, The Body Tourist, and of Finding the World: Thoughts on Life, Love, Home and Dogs, a collection of her most popular columns spanning twenty years. She is the Literary Arts Program Coordinator for the Dalton Creative Arts Guild. Publication history and more at Danashavin.com. Email her at [email protected].