Wexford town Date Friday, April 26, 2024 - 06:13 AM PST Topic Experiences It's amazing what a little distance can do for a person. In my case a round trip of 300 miles and 8 months at a computer. I've left behind an opinionated boyfriend, a bare yet paradoxically messy flat and my flat screen monitor, these being the components which have featured most prominently in my time away. But now I'm back in the town of my birth and the house of my childhood. I've spent the last while at college, an occupation that consisted mostly of filling in the time between classes reading slashdot attempting to find some new distraction. While there I'd thought of my old home in terms of the land, the fields and briars of the Irish countryside. But I was wrong. My home is in this old house. The spaces where I fit in, old movements coming back. Three steps between the kettle and the bin, drop the teabag in. Like a musician who knows the positions of the notes through muscle memory, the house is part of my body. As a couple of days pass I see some of the old thoughts come stealing back into my dreams. I wake up confident with visions of a trip to California to see San Francisco. I pace around the living room feeling the need to make something, draw a picture, bake a cake, scrawl daisies on the wall anything... These are my thoughts, I'm a nerd. I read William Gibson, I don't like the hassle of travelling. I have no time for the frivolous or extraneous. These were my thoughts, the younger me is still here. I see now what my old home meant. It wasn't the wet fields under a steel sky or my mother's meticulously decorated house, it's who I was, and though I make every attempt to hide it, who I still am. This article comes from Shmeng http://www.shmeng.com/ The URL for this story is: http://www.shmeng.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=745