Places of No Return

A dear friend lisalemonjello wrote today about searching for Raymond Carver. It's a beautiful entry that captures perfectly the yearning and ultimate frustration of trying to find what I think of as places of no return.

We all have them, even in our own lives---those intersections of time and place that are so completely ours that they cannot be held onto or shared, even by us. I have lived a fairly nomadic existence for most of my life, even as I struggle to tote all the gathered mementos of place with me. My house is filled with souvenirs of my existence---a bag of rocks my father gave me when I was seven, a feather from the year I had my first kiss, a rebozo from the morning I walked in the fog after making love with a man I would never see again, a spray of berries from the yaupon tree in front of the little house in the woods. Almost every piece of furniture has a story it it, every painting or sculpture carries a part of my life inside.

My house is crammed full of these tokens, precisely because the places are gone. The places were like soap bubbles that had a finite existence. Even the places that were mine cannot be revisited. I tried to do this, going back after I'd moved on. They were different to the point of being uncomfortably surreal in some instances. After I'd moved back to Texas from California, I loaded my kids in the car and drove up to a small town in the hill country where I'd spent almost every summer until I was in my mid-twenties. My grandparents had lived there, in a tiny but neatly kept community made up of mostly retirees. My grandmother had been dead for several years at this point and my grandfather had remarried and moved away. The house was still there, run down and overgrown. The neighborhood had declined in the way that can be seen only in rural areas, complete with tied-up dogs and cars in the yard on almost every other lot. I cried all the way home and I still wish I had never, ever seen the grotesque Pottersville version of my childhood sanctuary.

You can't go back. It's one of the fundamental truths of life. I still collect the small bits and pieces that remind me of these places of no return, but not in a grasping way anymore. I even sense that I am going toward a place as I age where I will feel no discomfort in leaving them all behind and living without the tangible comfort of my memories. That place is still a long time away, but I can feel it in my bones; the peace of it grows in me as my own soap bubble floats along.