Brey Willows

Card 20, Writing Down the Bones: Tell me about a place you need to return to.

Why? That would be my first question. Why go back? Why look back? What is the point of returning?

We watched a really sad movie the other day that was listed as a comedy. It wasn’t funny, not in any way. It was about a man whose daughter talks him into going back to Poland so she can see where her family, who were captured by the Nazis, came from.

All it did was make him sad. It made him relive the worst moments of his life just so she could walk through it as a tourist, with her books and camera. She seemed utterly unaware of what it was doing to him and why he wouldn’t want to board the train…

I suppose I’ve taken this question to be a negative right off the top, which probably says more about my own frame of mind. Perhaps it’s the word need that implies something serious. There are plenty of wonderful places I could return to. Venice, my favorite place in the world. Thailand, which I can’t wait to explore in more depth. I love Greece and would love to go to every single island.

And that’s the point. I don’t need to return to things or places in the past. Those ghosts have settled and are no longer my companions. The places I’d like to go back to are those in my future, where the adventure and new memories are.