No one goes home

 

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Is it just me, or is the place of our childhood not really as we remember it?

When I think of our ‘Away,’ that place where I spent the summers of my childhood, visions of picturesque views flash in my mind — lush greens, vast meadows, wide fields, clear springs.

But whenever I visit that very same place as an adult, I notice that the fields I roamed as a kid are not really wide, the meadows not as vast, and the hills, not as high.

I notice the changes in the place I call home, but more than that, I also notice the disparity between what I remember of it and what the place now seems.

The ‘Away’ I remember changes in every visit. So yes, I agree that in a sense, our ‘Away’, our home is gone; we can never go home again.

But I’d like to add that we also do NOT go home — ever. The one who has left is not the same person who goes home. For, sometime between one’s leaving and coming home, no matter how short the time interval is, one undergoes changes. 

 We are our old selves, but having evolved, we’ve become different.

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This is my response to a good post by a friend in my other blog during a discussion on life in rural Philippines. Commenting on how our ‘Away’ has changed, the friend, IloKona, posted:

wen, pari vf, mannalonkami… (translation: yes friend VF, we are farmers)

and we better perpetuate those memories
of our ‘away’ in our mind. because the ‘away’ that we remember, the
home of our hearts, is no longer the same.
it has changed forever, irreversibly.

the ‘away’ that we remember, our home, is gone.

we can NEVER go home again!

— Ilokona, March 18, 2008    

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my feeling is that we change
in our subconscious and we
externalize that change subconsciously
in subliminal applications towards a
stored memory and we produce a distortion
of a once vivid memory choosing which
distortion to keep and which one to discard.
and after a while
the subject and the object
are intertwined and refracted at the same time
into a mental diffusion,
so that when we actually experience the
‘memory’ again, we’d notice the subtle changes,
like we notice an irritant in our shoe.
more often than not, it is us who did change
having outgrown the memory in our minds, the memory
embedded in our minds frozen in a stunted, controlled,
bonsai state. 

—Ilokona, March 24, 2008  

[Ilokona’s comments re-posted with permission.]. 

[Photo Caption: A view of our ‘Away’ in Bambang, Nueva Vizcaya]

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//Sherma E. Benosa

22 March 2008