Can’t go back, only on.

Life is a funny thing, I think. I’m so lucky – I have friends in so many places, tucked down side streets and behind brown front doors looking out on to parks or high roads or dimly lit pub gardens. New friends around every corner just waiting to be made, old ones at pub tables waiting for you to get a round in, lost ones that you think of sometimes in the quiet moments of conversation, forgotten ones that come back to you without your realising it in a story they were present for, or in a quote you can’t remember where you heard it, or a song you love and they love too, and ones who even when you’re gone for a long time don’t notice the passing of it. I saw you 5 years ago and i saw you yesterday – feels the same either way.

Anyway. Do you think we can ever go home? Do you think that the very nature of a return means that you have to reconcile yourself with the fact of your own changing, as well as the changing of others? I think so. It’s a strange thing because to shift within yourself means that you inevitably shift within the world. The holes you used to slot into so easily can feel like you catch all the edges of yourself on them, and need to try hard again to smooth them out. In your head, the world you inhabited before you left and came back to hasn’t changed. In your head you haven’t changed either. Then you get this weird cognitive dissonance, because everything changes at all once. But, equally, none of it is different either. When we’re sad I think we try and go back to places that once made us happy only to realise that it wasn’t the place, but us who were happy. We’re sad when we’re sad no matter where we are. But that’s not what I want to talk about really.

I’m not really sure what it is I want to talk about if I’m honest. I’m sorry I treat this like my diary more than I should. Thomas Wolfe wrote a book called You Can’t Go Home Again. I’s about a man, George Webber, who becomes and author and on the moment of his return home everyone rejects him for finding themselves exposed in his books. It’s quite sad, and there’s no parallel there for me – but something about that notion comes back to me all the time:

You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood … back home to a young man’s dreams of glory and of fame … back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory

It’s not home really that he means I think. It’s that you can’t go back to the home you remember because it only really exists there, deep in the folds of your mind, collecting dust. But would life be easier if we never went anywhere? Would you feel better if we just kept ticking along all the time? I think sometimes that we might – but I didn’t do that, and so I have to make my peace with the fact that the world continues to turn, and so do I.

When I was 19 I thought I could come home, return to an old job, go back to old ways of being. But I couldn’t. Too much had changed, I couldn’t keep up with the people any more, I didn’t speak the same language anymore – I’d been away to London and lost my little oxford Burr, and lost the country sensibility that really only exists here. I cried to my mum in between christmas and new year about how it was all moving too quickly and I felt a stranger in my home town. People asked me where I’d come from. People forgot who I was at all – a middling middler – too London for the country, too country for London, neither fish nor fowl and no legs to run with. She said this: You can’t go back. You always leave for a reason, and no matter how happy you were once, you can’t ever get that same happiness back. We’re all always caught in a cosmic return; the year turns over us, and the earth goes around the sun and the moon around us in concentric circles of repetition: birthdays, christmases, evenings at the pub – but it’s an upward spiralling (that’s me borrowing from Justin Barton again) the return never quite brings you out in the same place; like coming at a familiar view from a different angle, or seeing yourself from the side. To come back isn’t to revisit, but to see it again for what it is – not what it was or you wish it were.

Am I labouring this too much? Maybe.

I feel, at present, like I’m caught in a strange stasis – I haven’t yet made my onward decision – I could go anywhere like a leaf caught for a moment before the wind flings it from the tree. There is no predestined path for me, just a wide open road with no destination to be spied at the end of it.

However I think the crux of it is this:

You can’t go back, only on.