Here, once again: I am in exactly the same room, in precisely the same house, in the identical town in which I was two years past. And yet, how impossible it is to be here again. And yet again, here I am.
Perhaps the question now is: What is this here that I am? What is it that can be transplanted from place to place, and what is it that cannot be transplanted from place to place? Should one be more wary of the interval that has passed -- the unmonitored, ongoing and somewhat abstract foreignness of all things within the places that one is not; -- or is return a form of resumption (the vital quality was the one you took away, the one that follows you now, so that from distant hills your shadow stands vast across the valleys)?
What if here is different? What if here is exactly the same? And isn't something lost if either of these is true, yet both cannot be false? And, following this line of reasoning, one asks: What if the "here" is only what I bring, and the "I am" -- my identity -- is the thing that remained, and could not be taken away? What if the "here", everywhere, is what one brings to it, and one's identity, correspondingly, is the sum of one's historical shadows, the echoes one evokes in the places one has been?
Should there even be a question, then, if one is here, again? Is one's life not simply passing and repassing the selfsame streets in which all places are here, and all equally attuned (though whether sympathetically or indifferently, it would be impossible to say) to some unstoppable act of becoming on the part of those that for a time live there?
When I look at rainy evening summer skies with a particular proximity of distant roof tops to the drearily commited slant of the sky, and particularly if the lights in the windows fail to shine for themselves, but rather hold external illuminations in a certain way, I think of the rainy smell of the paving slabs all down Leicester Road, looking down on the Abergavenny Estate, until one reaches it, and looks upward toward everything else.
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