For so long, I wanted to run from my past in my home city. I'd walk down the streets, and they would feel small and cramped. The air was too heavy to breathe, it felt like a dome was placed over us all from which I could not escape. And then I went to Glasgow, and I remember walking down the street as the air felt clean and the pavements wide and the sky above distant and not crushing. Within two weeks I'd moved there.
Do you know what happened then? When I made it my home? The pavement shrunk, the sky fell down, and the air was as thick with dirt as my home.
I could escape my city, but I never could escape my past. That followed me; it was the “shrink me” pill in Alice in Wonderland, turning wide spaces into shrinking cracks.
I moved back home, in the end. And now I love it here again. Because these streets are not at fault for my past, they were just witnesses to some of it. If you need to escape your city or the people in it, that's one thing. But you can't escape yourself, you'll always follow you.
