Thoughts from Places: A Return

It is a curious experience to return to a place you know well that feels as though it no longer knows you. Having been away from home for over a year, and being so changed and happy from my time away this is a bittersweet return.

It is as if my house from the time I was five years old now feels more like a museum than a home. I walk the halls recalling memories that no longer feel like my own, seeing belongings that have now become relics.

It’s the seeing people that you knew for so long and recognising faces that are attached to stories the way they are attached to their bodies. When these faces recognise you, but no longer know you. You do not share a life anymore, but lead different lives in different places connected only by this place, a weak cable binding you together.

It is the driving the streets you always knew, now under a new traffic plan and getting lost in a place you know like the back of your hand.

It’s eating local food you love from a restaurant you had never been to and feeling nostalgic for things you are experiencing in that moment. It is a strange sensation to feel homesick while you are home because you were lucky enough to find a new home in your time away.

There is something peculiar about falling back into old routines as a new person.
Above all it is the seeing friends so dear to you that is seems as if no time has passed and the year apart was just a dream that never happened, but all the while knowing that you are better because of that year and not willing to let it go. It’s the overlap of new memories precariously perched on top of old memories, and making new memories with old friends.

Then, all of a sudden, it takes you by surprise. It’s realizing that high school is over and everything that upset you about this place in the past is behind you. It’s realising that happiness is not limited to one place but follows you wherever you allow it. It’s finding new friends in old acquaintances and enjoying yourself more in the two-week return than in the four years you lived there. It’s the reluctance to leave after you had been so reluctant to return in the first place.

At the end of the day it’s the smallest things that stick out. Not my high school graduation or my first relationship, not learning to drive or overcoming the struggles that seemed so great at the time but now are so insignificant. It’s the jokes I found so funny I laughed until I cried, it’s the mundane tasks I had to complete, it’s the simple times that were happy times. And it’s the new memories made.

At the end of the day it’s the people that make me happy, the people that I cherish, the people I will always remember.