Re:turn.

That last bit, I know it so well. Past the shoreline, past reeds, and trees and bike paths. Past the sliver of an island where I first got drunk. Past the old stone bridge, wasn't there a story of the architect plunging to his death from its edge to save him the shame of seeing it fall? And then the train had stopped at its final destination; like a bad holiday rom-com, I was back in the city where I grew up.

Anxiously navigating familiar streets; I know them by heart and still they are strangers to me. Avoiding eye contact for fear of recognition. Past my old high school, the town square, the orange buses. The twang of the voices around me like an untuned piano in my cringing ears. Such a friendly dialect. My old hairdresser and the concrete slab library relic from the 70s, a reminder of happy childhood summers and it is a beautiful city to grow up in. Another shudder, down my spine. Turning the corner and climbing the elevator, I entered predictability, comfort, a world entirely according to expectation and plan. The world we grew up in, regenerated.

And yet the goal was worth it. Three days spent holding this baby, this new child in a family without blood ties. The magic of shallow breaths against my own, of impossibly small fingers wrapped around my cynical limbs and warm weight sleeping soundly in my arms. Of an entirely new person in the making, and the way the world stops revolving around us when we find ourselves part of a greater whole. I held on to her curious gaze, the soft smell of her blond locks, the innocence of her trust, and swallowed my pride.

That city is not mine. I left it long ago and perhaps it never was to begin with. While it twists and turns through my innards like shrapnel from a war I thought I'd finished long ago, it wraps people I love in soft down and whispers to them sweetly of a life just like they always knew it.

How glad I was when the time came to leave.