You Can’t Take a Picture of This, It’s Already Gone

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“Home is where I want to be pick me up and turn me ’round”– Talking Heads

It’s that time again.
That time of the year that you go home. To the place that you experienced your childhood. The place your Mom and Dad live. The place that has the only bed that has ever mattered.
The place that still holds onto the life that you left behind when you were told to grow up.

But each time you go home. It feels a little different. A little off.
You can’t quite put your finger on it as you stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars you affixed to your ceiling seventeen years ago.

Why don’t I feel like I’m home? This looks like my home. Those are the same stickers on the back of my door, whose exact trace has never left my fingers. Those are the same milky stains in the floorboards, whose existence came to be as Sammy aged and became incontinent. Those are the same windows that over look the highway, whose path took me away from here five years ago.

This trip you decide you’re going to dig a little deeper. Tear away the boards you’ve nailed over the obvious picture.
You peek through and that is when you see it.

For the first time, it all becomes clear: The white frost that has glazed over your mother’s once copper skin. The little brown dots traversing up the now rough terrain of your father’s hands. The frothy slur in your Grandmother’s voice. The recognition of bewilderment upon meeting the child born from someone you climbed trees with not that long ago. The decaying facade of your family’s business, their heart and soul, still sitting vacant on the comparably disintegrating Main Street. You see for the very first time that all of this, everything that you thought was a constant, has changed.

Changed while you weren’t even paying attention.

Desperation quickly floods in and you try to freeze everything, but you can’t.
It’s already gone.