A certain sense of missing

I ran by my old house today. I've lived in two houses my whole life. The first was from birth to fourth grade. The second is from then until now. I've lived in my current house for more time now actually than my old house, but this will always be classified as the new house to me. Not that it doesn't feel like home, because it does. It's just a different home. A different period of my life.

I first run on the road in the back of my house. My dad's superior fence is still standing. I try to look through the boards or look over the top to see the backyard. The playset with the fading red canopy that marked the presence of children is now gone--understandably so. The shed my dad built [where I used to sneak into and kiss the neighbor boy] is still there. I wonder if it still smells the same, like new wood and old possessions. The people moved The Rock to the backyard. It is where that mysterious wooden wheel used to be. I don't see the wheel anymore, but The Rock is out of place. They cut down the leafy tree in the "Jungle" side of the backyard--the one that helped us hop the fence or pretend we were monkeys. They cut down trees in the "Forest" side of our backyard as well. It's not as dense nor as adventurous. I still see the huckleberry bushes begging to be picked. Those used to sustain us for afternoon upon afternoon. The grass is dead. The backyard just seems...tired. It's just there with a hunch in its back and wrinkles in its hands. Years of unuse has left it lonely and dormant. I want to climb fence and give the backyard one last sprint, one last search, one last breath. I feel entitled to break in. This is my yard. The other people are merely borrowing it...for eleven years.

I run around the front up my old street, which is a lot shorter than I remember. I passed Amber's house, the woman who had no children, but had the Garden of Eden for a yard. Her flowers were her babies. As children we were forbidden to go near the masterpiece she had created. But she has since moved away. Her flowers left soon after. There was Felicia's house. Still the same. Pride Rock was in it's rightful place and there were pine cones all over the lawn from the towering pine tree--just like always. Dave's house was different because Dave no longer lives there. The grass is cut in the backyard--no longer three feet high, and the overgrown blackberry bushes have disappeared. I passed the house with the meanest parents, the house with the myriad of pets, the house where the people got a divorce and where I stole from their garage sale, the house where the man kept to himself even when he saw my brother crash his bike, the house where Robin lived whose house always smelled like smoke and perfume--a smell I came to be fond of, the house where the bus driver lived and with the only teenagers on the block, and the house with never-ending kittens.

The neighborhood is quiet now. It got older just as I did. Some people moved away; most stayed. I miss that neighborhood. I miss that house. And it's the kind of missing where you know you can't ever have it again. The kind of missing where it scares you when your memory starts fading. When people miss other people, most of the time it's with the expectation of seeing them again. This is different. You know it's gone, and that it's been gone a long time. It's been gone so long that you wonder if it even happened or if it is the same life. Eventually nostalgia becomes heavy and unbearable.

So I turned around and ran from home to...home.