When I was young, I was bored. My mind was numbed by the dry, empty air, by the blue, cloudless sky and the ever-present, sweet breeze. Nobody could have told me that I would long once more to sit in a shady spot among the branches of a gnarled tree, to fly high up on the well worn seat of the swings of the park down the street, to hear the train chug past late at night and early in the morning while still riding on the tail-end of a good dream. Nobody tells you how much you will miss the past when it is finally the future. Nobody tells you to enjoy the moment you are in, to soak it up, to breathe it in deeply until there is nothing left but a husk of what once was. But before you know it, your fondest moments are but pictures in an album, items stuffed into plastic bins high up in the rafters of a cold, stale garage. The past is the past. 

The first time I felt homesick, it came as a shock to me. The very day I came home to a moving van, watched strangers carefully wrap and package my belongings, my life, the safety blanket of home, I sat atop an overturned chair and thought tomorrow this will all be unpacked, they will say something came up, that we aren’t going after all. But I said goodbye to my friends like I was leaving, I packed my things like I was leaving, I looked around my house, touched every wall, breathed in every space, every memory until it was a husk and still, we weren’t leaving.

Until we were. Until I arrived at the home of my estranged aunt and uncle who greeted me with hugs and kisses and questions I wasn’t prepared to answer. I spent my time alone, curled up in borrowed blankets on a deflating air mattress, wondering when I would see my hometown again. I clung to everything I could, pestering friends who had lives of their own, without me. And life moved on, like I knew it would. Friends became acquaintances and I soon forgot how the dry, empty air felt. I forgot the nuances of the cloudless blue sky. I no longer remembered the scent of the ever-present breeze, was it soft and gentle, strong and sweet, mellow and fresh? I couldn't remember anything I had once loved.

It had felt like betrayal, to forget the place that cultivated my very being. My many memories all hung in the air where they been made, little fragments frozen in time. Unknown to others who sat on the same swing as I once had, walked on the same rusty railroad tracks, fell asleep in the same bedroom, those places were all for me, not for them. They were all I knew and they instead made to become someone else's hand-me-downs. How could they appreciate the things I had? Would they know where the sunset looked most beautiful, or the best place to hide during hide and seek, or to sit atop the low stretch of roofing outside the bathroom window, where the morning sun felt like a warm embrace as it greeted the day? They wouldn’t. They would never know who I was, or that I’d even been there. And as time went by, I realized perhaps it wasn’t so much that I missed my beloved hometown, but that those who followed behind me would not love it the way I did. Oh, I wanted it to be loved. It was special and wonderful and great and I couldn’t bare knowing how someone else could think otherwise. It was my prized possession. It was all I knew. It was everything I am.