Coming Back Again

Just when I think I'm happy, memories of everything I left behind me come back. A letter, or a once inspiring thought that suddenly strikes me as being very selfish of myself turns everything sour. It pollutes the palette for life the way a partially rotted fruit contaminates the rest of the batch. Who am i to think that I can just turn away from everything I've ever known, and leave it for something better? Can anyone truly do that? I never ever thought I'd become one of those people who ends up leaving their home, family, and friends to start over completely, isolating anything and everything that reminds them of the past into a neatly quarantined corner of their brain to just sit, like a convict stuck in a dank prison cell while the rest of our pristine society goes on about their day, content to ignore them, disturbed when reminded of their existence.

I often wonder how I got here. I can trace the steps that lead here pretty far back. it's amazing to think how different my life could have been. There were several turning points. Some of them make perfect sense, were gradual and the result seems inevitable. Some are sudden, irrational changes of mind. But how could I even think that I could abandon everything, my roots, my relationships, just because I tired of them, wanted something else? I'd come to think of this new place as my home, and it's true, I feel more at home here than I ever did at my old house, in my familiar room, in my parents' arms. But am I still, deep down, the little girl who cried at the thought of having to one day move away from her family? Do I even have a family anymore?

I'm afraid to go back home and see all of the old haunted places I used to go to. Sometimes the memories are warm and soft, but sometimes they leave me chilled, a mixture of reupulsion and regret that I could ever have been the person that I was. Have I really changed that much? I sometimes wish I could have stayed happy there, but I wonder, would I really have been much better off there? From this perspective, it seems awfully bleak and depressing. And in the end, I think I am glad that I left. There was just too much pain and bad feeling there to be mended. Too many relationships gone sour. Even I felt sour and depleted of any warmth there, too. And I hated it! I hated feeling contempt for others and I hated myself for being contemptible in turn. I didn't want to be this person, and so I left. I guess I have lost the mutability I once had when I was in school. Even then, though, it was hard. I would stressfully have to change my entire lifestyle every few months, and it became harder to do every time. And when the time came for me to graduate, the time came when I had to choose... and I chose to leave.