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Some streets are paved with memories. It is always strange going back to a familiar place. For a while, that word meant very little to me. I was exploring the unfamiliar. I was drenched in foreign landscapes, stifled by their newness. It has been a long time since I have been able to call somewhere home. I have called many different places home in the last few years. I have called many different people home. I have lived in homes that had no doors, felt trapped by home, been involuntarily forced out of home. The thing about home is its way of making you feel like it will always be there to return to. But even home isn't permanent.
Things change even when we don't want them to. People move in different directions. Leaves fall from trees and lose their color. It is nice to feel the change, sometimes. It is nice to romanticize these places: their antiquity, the sense of nostalgia, the feelings that come back to you as if time persisted and never left. It is nice to feel like there is always something out there, waiting on you, calling out to you without you even knowing. Lurking in the different corners of your life as you make your way in and out of homes that aren't meant for you. That there is a place out there, a feeling, a person. One thing that doesn't change in the midst of all of this chaos, and that you can return to them. Here is permanence. Here is home. Here is something that you can hold onto when you can't seem to hold onto anything else.
These streets are paved with memories, but the memories are lifeless now. These corners of the earth are losing color and I am finding myself walking in between all the different seasons of my life. I am changing, too. I am just a memory here. I am just a ghost. I am holding on to things that I no longer know and forcing myself into a house that I left years ago. I will find my place. One day, without even expecting it, I will plant roots and it will feel right. But right now I have to move forward.
