The familiarity of home

Whatever you do, whatever way you go, whatever drawer you open, it all feels familiar.

It doesn't matter what has happened in the last twenty years, the familiarity of what you knew and repeated in the first twenty years of your life, it's programmed. It's in there. Not budging. Not an inch.

It's the repetetive nature of what you did, never questioning it at the time, not considering there were other ways to do things, it was this way, and change was neither looked for, strived for, nor was it required.

So twenty years later, after not being in this place for such a long time, you repeat it. It's like auto pilot, you actually don't know how to do it any different. It is this way, because it was this way. It doesn't need changing. Change would be wrong.

That's what coming home feels like. Familiar and easy. Comforting and unchallenging.

Can I continue to live this way. Most probably not, but I don't have to.  That is not even a question that needs posing.  I don't live here.  My life is no longer here.  Yet none of that matters.  The past is here. My story began here. How I became "me" is here.

And today that's all that matters. And right now, I do belong here. And I wouldn't want to be anywhere else.