Everyday Canvas

The Way Home Is Ahead

True, you can’t go to that home again, because you’ve left it behind. What you call home is a different place now. You’ve started your life in a new city, probably with other people, and through different understandings, and you are going forward.

You took your chances, made your own mistakes, established another place you call home, and found other comforts and assurances. You may think you might go to your first home again, if the relationships there were perfect, but then, is any relationship perfect or do you see it coated with sugar in hindsight? Don't you recall your misery deep down? And, why would you want to pull out the scabs and rub salt on old wounds?

Despite the magnetic pull of a few happy memories, there are many you wish you wouldn’t remember. In addition, there is that thing called time, which changed you and made you move forward. You can’t freeze up and fall backwards now. You have to go ahead.

Anyhow, the building that housed the home you grew up in is knocked down, and that whole neighborhood has been turned into a business district. Not one family lives on that street now, and all the backyards serve as parking lots. When you go there, what you see is a paved street instead of the cobblestone one and storefronts galore. You can’t even find where that house was, which backyard supported your earliest daydreams and hide-and-seek games behind the fruit trees. So you shake your head and walk away holding on to your enigmatic powers of self-healing, self-protection, and forgiveness.

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Prompt: They say you can't go home again. {After leaving a home you grew up in for years.} Do you agree with this statement?