Thoughts on returning

I mentioned heartbreak and demons in a tweet yesterday. Reading it now it strikes me as overly dramatic. A good turn of phrase, but not entirely accurate. Not entirely.

My sister remarked on how her friends, now two years past their break-ups and involved in new relationships, still kvetch about running into their exes on visits home. She's in their same boat now. And she thinks it's a pretty shitty deal. It still surprises me that for all her gifts, empathy doesn't seem to be one of them. She didn't 'get' until now the anxiety that comes from having the past you'd like to forget lurking around every corner. Maybe it's not empathy, but just a lack of imagination...

For many of us from El Paso who've made our homes and lives elsewhere, this is a shared holiday experience. We return home to celebrate and catch up with friends and family, often finding ourselves confronted not just by memories, but by the living, breathing inhabitants of those memories.

I suppose we're lucky. Some people have to deal with heartbreak in the same city where they live. I think those people are very brave.

Braver still are those whose memories don't walk, but haunt instead. Not ghosts of people, exactly, but of loss and tragedy. Death and destruction of the world they had defined for themselves. A father gone to work, never to return. A sister lost in the desert night. Public trials and years of healing. The coming and going of anniversaries that were never joyous.

Still we come home or stay home even as we make new homes for ourselves. We go to mass on Christmas Eve in the church where we were married...the church where our father's funeral was held...the church where our sister's memorial service was recorded for the nightly news. We drive past the streets and buildings and vistas of significance that are insignificant to everyone else. We make new memories. New lives. New dreams. We move on. We're happy.

And we return.

And tomorrow I return home, too, and leave my hometown behind.