You Can Never Go Back

On nostalgia.

You feel it first in your fingertips. It tingles. The thought of returning. The thought of seeing it all again the way you once did. From there, it spreads. It is your feet, the memory of bare grass beneath them. It is visceral, unyielding. It is nowhere, and then everywhere all at once. Hunger blooms open in your chest, a flower whose leaves fall to the table. You leave them there for weeks. Watch them rot. Imagine them growing roots down through the wood and the rug and the tile into the dirt that must lie beneath. It is dizzying inside your head, the way the air will go crisp up against your skin when you finally breathe it in once more. How the trees will look in the light and the roads will feel familiar and you will feel that familiarity in your body too. Right once more, as if you never left at all. As if never leaving was an option the way you sometimes want it to be. The feeling grips like a panic, rises up through your throat and into your brain. Inside, the world goes blank. If only for a moment. I would go back in a second, in a heartbeat, without anyone ever even having to ask. Without knowing that loss is everywhere you go, that nothing stills or stays the same for long, and sometimes it is worse to come back a stranger than to never come back at all. Sometimes the connecting thread is so thin it is transparent and you are the only one who sees it, who still clings to it, who cares at all. There are places you miss that do not miss you. There are places that will feel like home and that can never be. Everything has a season, everything has a time that you meet it. Including yourself. Including all the different versions you will be. You can still smell the air. You will never stop smelling that air. Clean. Smoke and damp pine. There is nothing like it in the world. There is nothing like the dark lake that never has an end. If I could write this story I would write it over and over again without any end to it. I keep starting these stories and never being able to stop because I can’t imagine that it won’t always be this way, I don’t even want to. When the car stalls at the airport I am crying again and I have stopped asking why. I am going home and I am never going home again. Through the glass window you see a different world. It doesn’t have to be these fields. It could be anywhere as long as it is somewhere you knew yourself. Sometimes, even, I imagine it is the city again, a place where, under different circumstances, I might never have lost myself at all. That is to say: I would have just been lost somewhere else instead. In my dreams it is still the field, the mountain, the trail I wandered off of and don’t think I ever returned from. When I imagine it I never imagine it how it is now. By now it must be overgrown and dirty, littered with footprints. Maybe, like so many of the other trails, they even shut it down. I think even now that a part of me died there. I haunt it like the ghosts. I am half a heart. I wander, still, in search of home. I ache for a place that does not exist anymore, might not ever have existed at all. I make beauty out of everything. I give a story to everything and not everything asks for one. Sometimes things just want to exist. People too. I can’t seem to let them. I can’t seem to stop starting these stories and stopping them all over again. I can’t let go of anything. I can’t let go of the blue green world and the flowers that, like me, appear in unwanted places. I remember sometimes that no one asked for me to come back. I make up where I am needed. I convince myself of the myth. I am a martyr before I am anything else. I am never going home, not really, not the way I want to. It doesn’t exist. Like me, it’s morphed with the years. The house has fallen in. The roof caves and swelters in the heat. It was never mine to begin with, anyway. Neither were the lovers, nor the trail, nor the forests that I carved my homes into. We all have to find our spots in the world. We all have to live with the memory. All of them, forever. I grow. I gather. I seep into everything. I fester. I survive. I go on looking. I drag my feet. I learn how to run.

Your prompt this week is to tell me about the first and last places that felt like home to you. What is different about them from your memory? What is the same?