There are different ways a place can hold memories. Sometimes you see them and other times you feel them. It might be just a breath, other times the feeling can consume you. But either way it moves you and either way it’s there.
Sometimes it can be like a waft of familiar perfume that makes your heart skip a beat. Or it’s like you travelled back in time and you’re no longer standing there but surrounded by your past unfolding in front of you. As if your soul escapes your body for a moment and the only thing possible for you to do is stand there and feel it. Close your eyes and feel it. It’s a perfectly indescribable feeling, that I think is about as close to time travel as one could get.
I feel almost an impossible contentment in those moments. As if no matter where those memories led to, they hold a piece of me that created the path to who I’ve become, and nothing else seems to matter. Everything stops around me. A certain stillness even in continuous movement of nature and time. Thoughts stop, breathing slows, heart beats quieten, I’m floating…
Floating.
It becomes so clear to me. This is where I was once, and here I am again. Looking back everything seems so simultaneously insignificant and full of importance. I guess there are moments that you will never be able to see as something that will shape you until you have the opportunity to revisit it.
I can’t help but think of how young I am, and how few moments and places and people like this I have truly encountered. But it fills me with such pure serenity to see from the outside, the things that made me who I am. I look forward to only more of it. To growing old and having an entire gallery of moments like this. To being filled with the feeling of memory. To being able to walk back along the path of me and revisit all the places that hold the memories I can feel. Because it truly is something special.
Lauren Kathleen 