on changing spaces and changing lives
after i wrote my post about revisiting a life i used to live and my other-other post about when you come back to a place you once lived to live again, i started to think about how life is in some ways about making pieces and gathering them together. how you stitch pieces of places and people together and add some sequins - travel, companion animals, experiences…and that’s a life. a slowly woven tapestry of all your collected (collective?) pieces.
maybe that’s why expressions like shattering into pieces or picking up pieces make so much sense. we darn and repair. we reweave and reshape the tapestry. new bits and old bits. all the things that make us who we are.
so this is where i was when i arrived at my next thought, which was, what does it mean to return?
etymologically the word return is from the latin re ‘ ‘back’ + tomare ‘to turn’. to turn back? is to turn back the same as to go back? does ‘to turn’ offer an undertone that ‘go back’ doesn’t? turn back feels like something was incomplete. you turned back before, you turned back because. do you feel it? to go back feels intentional. you went and did a thing and then you went back. you go back.
apparently in the 14th century, ‘return’ came to represent the act of “coming back”, which of course, is how we generally know it.
i’m nearly three years in and i feel like the return has lost its charm. maybe it was never there. maybe it was the convenience of a smaller community disguised as charm. but what i’ve found, since having been back to visit a city i made a life in for 20 years, is that in reality, i don’t really feel like i belong anywhere. life and lives in both cities continued while i wasn’t there and now whenever i reinsert myself, it’s never quite right. like freud’s unheimlich, the uncanny. unfamiliar. or in this case, familiar enough, and yet still unfamiliar.
all that space for all that living has created a distance that seems challenging to overcome. it’s not less friendly or less familiar it’s just…not the same.
fascinating, i think. something to think about. does this happen to everyone, whether they change spaces or not? i wonder.
nxx