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Because you can never go back
There is something about the new flat - several somethings - which remind me of home. Mum and Dad's home, I mean. The door into the living room has glass panels in, which is just like the one leading into the dining room. The walls are the same magnolia. The quality of the light is similar - soft, golden, summery.
I keep expecting one of the cats to pad into the room, or my mum to ask me if I want a cup of tea, and then I remember they're a hundred miles away, and I feel older and sadder and a little lost.
I think, then, of that old saying that you can never go back, and I know it's true. It lodges somewhere in my heart, somewhere between grief and acceptance. It's not that I don't like the life I have. It's not that I don't love my career or my independence or my friends. But sometimes it's all fraught and complicated, and I feel very tired, like I'm older than my bones and my skin.
It would be nice, then, to hear my mum asking me if I want sugar with that cup of tea. That would be a decision I could say yes or no to, and the answer wouldn't matter. Time would be soft and golden and summery as the light.
I guess that's what the past looks like through a film of nostalgia. Because even as I sit here and type this, I know that it wasn't really like that. There were other times - times of teenage emo angst and times of anger and frustration.
But when I think of home, none of those things come to mind. Instead I think of sunlight through the bay windows, and the cats sitting in the strawberry netting, and the rapeseed turning the hills into vast yellow flags. The bad things fade: the good things shine.
So I hope that when I look back on the last few months, stress and tears and apathy and emptiness will be driven out like the shadows that they are, and this too will become soft golden summery shining. I hope that as I go forward I will recognise the shadows for what they are, for what they will be: nothing, fading under the best of what is yet to come.
I can never go back. I know that. But I can go forward, and hope.
I keep expecting one of the cats to pad into the room, or my mum to ask me if I want a cup of tea, and then I remember they're a hundred miles away, and I feel older and sadder and a little lost.
I think, then, of that old saying that you can never go back, and I know it's true. It lodges somewhere in my heart, somewhere between grief and acceptance. It's not that I don't like the life I have. It's not that I don't love my career or my independence or my friends. But sometimes it's all fraught and complicated, and I feel very tired, like I'm older than my bones and my skin.
It would be nice, then, to hear my mum asking me if I want sugar with that cup of tea. That would be a decision I could say yes or no to, and the answer wouldn't matter. Time would be soft and golden and summery as the light.
I guess that's what the past looks like through a film of nostalgia. Because even as I sit here and type this, I know that it wasn't really like that. There were other times - times of teenage emo angst and times of anger and frustration.
But when I think of home, none of those things come to mind. Instead I think of sunlight through the bay windows, and the cats sitting in the strawberry netting, and the rapeseed turning the hills into vast yellow flags. The bad things fade: the good things shine.
So I hope that when I look back on the last few months, stress and tears and apathy and emptiness will be driven out like the shadows that they are, and this too will become soft golden summery shining. I hope that as I go forward I will recognise the shadows for what they are, for what they will be: nothing, fading under the best of what is yet to come.
I can never go back. I know that. But I can go forward, and hope.