A Poem For Anyone Who’s Tried To Outrun A Memory

I’ve been reflecting a lot on place and memory, and how we as people are, in our totality, a blend of memory and the imaginary. I refer to the “imaginary” as the people we dream of becoming or the things we envision ourselves achieving, and “memory” as an intangible force that influences us, shapes who we are today, and how we navigate the world. These memories are elusive; they are intangible and suspended in the mind, but what if that isn’t entirely true? 

What if memory could be held, not in the hand, but in something more enduring of time? What if that vessel were a place? 

Many of my memories center around a single place that often appears: my home. For me, my home carried the weight of both creation and fracture; it is a space saturated with emotion, where joy, pain, and everything unspoken intertwined within the walls. Home has become so significant to me that leaving it for college felt almost impossible. Recently, coming back from school has made me think about how fragmented my childhood memories are. When I enter my home, I find myself recalling moments, and in these moments, my memories seem to be possessed by a physical form. 

The walls are painted in the same hues, resonating with echoes of childhood laughter and arguments. I wander through rooms that seem to know my memories better than I do now. Photographs stare at me like silent witnesses, while the furniture holds secrets I can no longer recall. My body remembers more than I do, tightening in certain rooms and flinching at shadows that are now devoid of meaning. This creates a separation between event and experience, revealing a fracture in the timeline of my ‘self.’

Returning home becomes a quiet confrontation, where the physical space collides with the layered, often hidden emotional histories embedded within it. 

I realized how much my external surroundings can influence my internal landscape. People carry a history of place inside them, and when we are displaced from this space, whether by choice or force, we witness an interaction between past ‘selves’ and our present being. These moments become thresholds for reconciliation, where memory, embedded within space, exerts a force capable of disruption, fragmentation, and transformation. My experience of home as a place will always be distorted by the past ‘selves’ held within it; it will always be refracted through emotion and time. 

So here is a poem I wrote about Home and the power it possesses.

“Green Hinge Doors”  

A house with a green door. 

No particular significance, but if you look inside

Houses memories:

Glass shower walls condensate tears

Beds hold weight in silent comfort

Stools beg me to sit 

So fathers can help with math 

I never fully understand

Stairs with one desire

Trip me

Polka-dotted Walls whisper 

I Love You  

I ask Walls 

Move

For the smells of imaginary

To erase my mind

Escape…more 

Today, I open the door.

Walls hug me

Releasing me

From old skins whispering decisions 

Worthy of the ‘self’ I dreamed into being.

Photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash