0 Comments Houses Down the Memory Lane

In retrospective I can say that I have lived in a fair number of different places during the last 10 years or so. For the total of six years I have lived abroad, away from my home and my parents (who managed to move approximately 7,000km away from what I used to call "home" during that time). I lived through student accommodation, annoying landlords, obnoxious flatmates and poor living conditions. I had to teach myself what it is to find a new [affordable] place in  the shortest period of time, what it is to move towns, what it is to move in with people you don't know when all you can do is hope it is going to turn out fine.

All this moving from place to place has diluted the idea of "home" as it is for me quite significantly, but I have to say that each house or flat I lived in still holds a certain place in my heart. Yes, some of them were quite terrible, and some landlords were plain unbearable, but I do have at least a few memories worth keeping about every single one of those places.

What I wanted to talk about here in this post is revisiting places one used to live in before. Not necessarily coming inside (as if some new tenant would let you in just like that), but even simply passing by in a bus, or walking by the building. To be perfectly honest, I myself fail to describe the feeling I get when I casually happen to be next to the place I used to live in. Temporary, short-term, but still home at some point...

For the record, for the first couple of years of living alone I never even fully unpacked my things and at times even lived off my suitcases. The logic behind it being that I will be leaving this place soon enough, so by not fully unpacking I would save myself some packing time in the future [oh, so mature and wise in my pre-18s!]. Later though I decided to 'go with it' and unpack completely, even being brave enough to occasionally buy something for the room, despite having to include it in my subsequent 'house removals'. That way I learned to view a new place as a new home, even if for a little while. 

Naturally, leaving each place you call "home" would inevitably mean having mixed feelings. See, one gets attached even to what is bad in their lives (I know, definitely not the healthiest thing to do, but that is kind of how us humans tend to work...) But especially that was true for those places where I had had the greatest times. Revisiting the places though, any of those places, is always (I don't even know...) haunting in a way, arouses curiosity and some inexplicable excitement within, and definitely sends me back down the memory lane. 

Whether or not it is a pleasant journey back in time or not, it demonstrates how a simple habit of living at a certain place can transform into something much more subtle and elusive like a lingering sensation of emptiness when one sees or thinks of a place one used to live in some years back. 

I am pretty certain I am not the only one thinking that way, and that a lot of you have experienced at least some of those nostalgia symptoms at some point. For now though, all the best! And don't forget to cherish your memories.

E.V.