Tuesday, September 8, 2015

89.

Lately I've been nostalgic for a place I'm not sure exists (anymore? or one that never did?).

I see people around me who are fighting so many small battles to make this home a home. To make it their home. To own it. To love it, in spite of...whatever it is that is trapping them. Their efforts exhaust me. I want to applaud them, but they also uncomfortably remind me of me not too long ago and I wonder how my cynicism has hardened into its own being, a tired creature with tired eyes.

And when I close my own eyes, it is the smell and feel of before, not the sight, which makes me long for home in an indescribable way. It smells of rain and grass and water from a rusty tap and there is a whiff of petrol and hot oil in a frying pan-maybe also the scent of frangipani, depending on which side of the grass you are crossing as you run. And it is warm, sticky and prickly-ants crawling up your bare legs; you scratch them away with the same hand you use to carelessly wipe sweat off your upper lip, leaving a streak of dirt there. Summer is endless. It will always be this way.

You're not sure where it is or came from or went. Geographically or otherwise.

So you think of leaving this feeling of loss behind. Hardening and cynicism isn't good for the soul. There is a niggle somewhere in your brain that the place you came from, the place you're going, the place you're looking for, doesn't exist (anymore? or never did?).