It's a funny thing to end a journey where you started. If you separate life into journeys, that is.
My seventh-grade Language Arts teacher had it right. He said that sometimes teachers lie-- that they don't tell the whole truth. When you're learning the concept of a sentence structure, he might have used the example, you don't need to be bogged down with all the exceptions-- you'll have an easier time understanding them once you've already conceptualized the verb and noun in their general forms, their untainted states. The elementary school teacher says 'Never start a sentence with "because"' and eventually you learn that you can, too, do this, understanding how to make your fragment a complete sentence by adding another clause after a comma, following your clause.
If you want.
"Speaking is different from writing," my teacher said. You don't have to speak in correct English in all situations, in fact oftentimes it's simply inappropriate, he encouraged us in our resistance to formality-- our fear of seeming to our peers too eager to embrace the knowledge handed to us by figures of authority; written English, he encouraged us, is a different beast. He presented to us, in this Language Arts class, this opportunity to stray from our acts--for in those days, we were all acting most of the time.
I was comforted by this chance, as I often felt--and still feel at times-- the need to subscribe: to one image, one system of beliefs, one consistent lifestyle-- But here I was being told that I could learn a language, the written English language, and I could convey a precise message about the world. By knowing where to place my punctuation in describing "the wide brick path" I could speak of the world and be completely understood.
But he, too, was not telling the whole truth. And this I did not know until journeys later; and to what extent he dismissed the whole truth, still I do not know.
To end a journey where you began is like learning the exception to the ruse. And you get this feeling like you never really knew what something was the first time around. You return to it, having abandoned that place, that moment, for another, re-contextualizing its entire significance and meaning. Your perception does not alter its being but to you, its and your existence have forever changed.
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I wrote this sitting on a couch in Meadville, four months after graduating College in that very place; these months held many homes for me until I completed something of a circle, ending my summer travels in the town that birthed the idea, back when it was still snowing. It's a funny thing to end a thought as you began it; that is, I suppose, life begins to seem so funny.
