How strange it is to return to a place you once knew so well. The streets, though limnal, have changed not a bit. It is all the same, different in every way.
The last time I was here, it felt like a bad place. I left to move nearer to family, but also because I had been through so much in the years I lived in Oregon and it had begun to feel suffocating. With all the time I found on my hands, I had little else to do but notice how I was feeling, and notice that I didn’t like what the city brought up in me. It felt like a bad place, it felt like I would not be able to truly breathe until I lived somewhere else. I had no expectations that moving would fix everything for me, but I knew I needed something different.
There is energy to each place. It is near-tanglible to me, I can nearly taste the energy in the air around me. Going somewhere new can feel exhilirating, like you are casting everything away, putting all the bad feelings and the bad energy behind you. No need to ever revisit any of it.
I sort of assumed I would come back here, but never in a real, tanglible way. I never pictured myself coming back. I didn’t think there was anything for me here.
But I do still have friends here. And I do have memories here. Years worth of them. There was something to come back to, it seems.