Unfamiliar Familiarity

There is something strange about coming home after four months.  It's unfamiliar familiarity.

You step through the threshold and the aroma of the house floods your nose, strong enough to evoke emotion-memories, subtle enough to prevent you from ever being able to recall it anywhere else.

You have to re-adjust your habits: simple motions and repetitive actions.  The microwave is too high, the counters are too low.  You grope around in the dark, swatting at the walls, trying to remember where the light switch is. Your foot rises and falls on level ground--you imagined an extra stair.

As I return to old places, detailed memories I'd let go flood back.  Stepping into my room, I'm reminded of the new-house smell that marked my first months in West Virginia.  The smell of paint and new carpet, blended with the memory of the music from my alarm clock, wearily sounding the return of another 5 am morning.  And other vague sensory details associated with the swollen heart and twisted gut I thought would never fade. 

My room heater hums and I think of lying on the floor, soaking in the heat like a reptile, phone practically melded to my ear, mouth spewing nothing and everything. Which reminds me of my first winter here: the endless snow days, trudging through a forest knee-deep in snow, sledding and eating pumpkin waffles with good friends. Beauty that I didn't fully see until it had passed me by.

 Friends come and go.  Years melt together.  A little pain here, a lot of joy there.

Time, rolling forward, never stopping before the unfamiliar becomes the familiar, and the familiar becomes the unfamiliar again.