For those places
no longer home.
Kept safest
in your minds own.

Heart aches for trodden roads.
Soul weighs with forgotten ghosts.

A hum whose words are lost,
of curtains drawn,
and bridges crossed.

The streets recede
twisted and strange.
I know this dream
if only by name.

This Avenue’s familiar.
The gates –
The doors –
In another world similar
I’ve been before.

They beckon from pictures,
from over my shoulder.
Yet once I’ve turned,
they slip even farther.

Someplace traversed
and somewhere fond.
I can never return
once they’ve gone.

– Rachel R. Vasquez, 11/11/2015

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

“If I come back, it will be a place, but it won’t be home any longer.” – The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman

I’m learning a common pattern in my life. From old jobs to old schools, once you’ve left a place in that point of time, you can never return. Even if you do, it will never be the same. It never feels the same. You can miss what it was, wish for it to become that place again, but that place is just a place once it’s no longer home.