Returning

a reflection

Photo by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash

Why do we yearn to return to those places where experience made you?

Each moment of our lives is geotagged with a location, each experience knows a physical home. There, in our minds, sits a visual connector to everything; we are tactile creatures, and these connections make remembrance more real, more vivid. All the many moments of our lives are sited in geography, and it is these locations which lock together in the jigsaw of our existences.

Just in the same way that music is linked to memory, places also push open the doors of our knowing.

And I ask myself this; as I yearn to return to the places which cup the grand, glorious and terrible moments of my life, is that yearning not part of a greater worry that time is running out for me to be in all of those places once more?

And I ask myself, should I return, will I walk into my youth once more, slipping on the gown of my former self which I had left hanging there? Or instead will I feel the compression of many years bearing down upon me, crushing my fragile bones as I look upon the echoes of the person I can never be again? I do not know.

I have a tiny vision clasped in my palm; a tour back to all the places I only know now in an increasingly unreliable mind’s eye. I think of creating a photographic anthology, a pathway of images which I can visit in future where I can say, no matter how my mind distorts the reality of what this is, I now have proof that I can return to, that I may hold within my palm.

But what if this exercise is already too late? What if everything has already moved on, and all I will be faced with is the sharp and joyless reminder that nothing that I knew and loved is left?

So perhaps the past should remain where I left it, after all.