Nostalgia isn't a home
None of us believed the sound that rang like it was your name said in an empty room. No plant was safe from the frosted mornings, that iced the water in their veins, knowing full well what is about to happen. Time is like that. The sounding of a bell, or frost about to cripple the gentlest of life. It moves us away from names and homes, and we can't go back. No matter how hard we try to step back into a memory. I've been trying most of my life to find a home that feels like the one I left behind decades ago. I feel the frost in my veins, the tolling of a bell, the memory of names forgotten under the ring. Even if I was to live in the same building again, it wouldn't be the same would it? All the names are gone. The bell's mouths are too cracked to speak. It will just be a shell of a memory. Phantoms can't walk out of walls, no matter what books tell us. You don't live in those walls. Life frosts over, and bells go silent. Until then, I hold hope that I will find a home, like the one formed in nostalgia, that maybe never existed. I think everyone feels it. Everyone knows it. The places that are taking form in memories that maybe never were. Maybe they're there to comfort us from the sharp truth of not knowing were we stand in the world anymore.