On a fine June morning in 2012, a week after graduating high school at the ripe age of seventeen, I left home and set off into the world.
Eleven years later, in April 2023, my homecoming has arrived.
I’ve been back to visit––for weddings, for family gatherings, for funerals––but now I’ve come to stay.
My grandmother has found her way to old age and lives alone. After falling twice, she invited my wife and I to live with her.
We accepted.
After what feels like a decade of traveling compressed into two years, my grandma’s request, in the midst of ongoing discussion about the future, presented the perfect opportunity for us to settle.
Sooner or later, we’re old enough to tread the same paths we walked when we were young. The hard part, I’m learning, is reconciling the two parts of me.
I’ve changed. As do all who experience the passage of time. I’ve gone on to higher education. Taught secondary and college students. Married an amazing woman. Wrote a book. Traveled around the country and the world. I’ve lived, and living changes people.
I’m not who I was. I’m no longer the young man who set off to become a web designer in Virginia Beach. I am the man who decided to pursue English and education and become a writer and teacher.
Two identities: one, my childhood self, and the other, the matured self.
Settling into this old place, it has at times felt like I’m trying to fit who I’ve become into who I was.
It’s not possible.
I’m not supposed to.
My childhood self is just as much a part of me as the last eleven years. I’m not supposed to fit myself into who I was, nor become that person again. I’m only supposed to do what any of us must. Be who I am today.
My childhood self is still a part of me. I don’t need to reconcile something that is already integrated. There’s no need to fuse my identities when they’re already one. Not the childhood or matured self. The maturing self.
Onward and upward,
Lee
