#and missing it

When Becky Chambers described a character's childhood home as 'a place they knew intimately and no longer knew at all', that phrase sent a ripple through my system and unclogged all the treacle all at once to present it before me, raw and unyielding, memories still attached.

My childhood home is in another country. And yet it is also in the same one I live now. The house I lived in, torn down and rebuilt for another family. The flowers outside, gone. The road up to it, exactly the same as it was two decades ago. I drove to look at it the other day and drove past it, its image so far removed from my memory.

In another country, the boulder I would perch upon with a dog long gone, still there, in the same spot, with the same curve where I used to sit. But the landscape around it changed, covered, uplifted and hidden. The path I wore into the dirt, blown away. The tree I used to climb, nothing but a stump. The house, bigger, emptied, busier, colder, warmer, more functional and yet breaking down at the seams. Currently, it is freshly painted and looking the same as when we first moved there. Or at least, that's what I've been told. I haven't seen. I won't see.

Places change without permission and it feels like such a betrayal. Don't they know I used to love that tree? Don't they know I used to hide under those flowers and talk to the fairies there? How dare they remove them and take them from me.