Neighbourhood You Used To Live In

The street looks the same. And completely different. Because the person who last lived here was a different version of you.

Walk it slowly. The route you used to walk by repetition, the walk to the shops or the bus stop or the park. The route your feet knew without thinking and that your body probably still holds, some muscle memory of the turns, the slight incline, the bit of pavement where the tree root has lifted the slabs.

There is the root. Still there. The municipality eventually repaired it, or it has been repaired and the root has risen again, because tree roots and paving slabs are in a permanent negotiation that the roots usually win. You stepped over this root a hundred times. Some part of you expected it.

The shop you used to use. Changed, maybe. The name different. The shop that sold the thing you needed regularly, bought so many times that the staff knew your face if not your name, may be gone. Many shops are gone, in any street you have not walked for years. Others have replaced them. Change at the ground floor is how streets admit the passing of time.

But look above the ground floor. The buildings themselves are usually older than the shops in them. The windows and facades of the upper floors where nobody is selling anything are often unchanged. The city's memory lives above the ground floor.

Here is something you did not know when you lived here: you loved it. You may not have said so, or known so, while it was happening. The mild aggravation of the too-small flat, or the noisy neighbours, or the commute that was too long, or the damp winter, may have occupied the foreground. But the place itself, the street, the corner, the way the light came through the window in the mornings of that particular year, that was a love that stored itself in the body and shows up now as this feeling.

The version of you who lived here is not gone. They are here, in this street, doing the things you did. Making coffee. Walking to the bus. Going through a year of this life in this place. You can almost see them ahead of you, moving in memory's fog, younger and less certain of some things and more certain of others.

What did you know then that you have since forgotten? There is always something. A younger self has access to energies and certainties and freedoms that accrete over time and become something else. What did you take for granted in that version of the years that you might want to reclaim?

Walk to the front of where you lived. If it is appropriate, stand there for a moment. The building does not know you. Buildings retain very little. But the space does something. The geometry of where you used to be.

Say goodbye, or simply acknowledge that you were here. This address was yours. These streets were yours. This sky, and the particular way the seasons looked in this specific postcode, was yours for that specific time.

You are allowed to miss it without needing it back.

Walk on. You carry the postcode inside you now. That is the better address.

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