The word “coming back” insistently comes to mind every time I return home, retracing the tree-lined streets, the meadows, and in the distance, I see the mountains of every color that tell me I’m close. I come back home, but not just to four walls with a roof, but to a place where every object, every corner murmurs of shared laughter, of thoughtful silences, of small and great achievements. Returning to that house that was first a place long imagined and desired, then became reality, both in its tangible foundations and beyond.
Coming back home is living by encountering the world and clashing with it, and then finding one’s own face reflected in the hallway mirror.
Coming back not as a physical movement in the sense of retracing a path already trodden, quite the contrary.
Coming back goes beyond the physical dimension of the places reached in life. It extends to the canvas of relationships we have carefully woven, by choice, through the adventures lived together.
Coming back to those relationships that guide us and remind us who we are beyond roles and circumstances.
Coming back in the sense of separating oneself from the life lived and thus seeing better, defining oneself better.
Coming back home is bringing ourselves back from what defines us to start anew.
And then there’s coming back to something else that is sometimes hidden or lost. Coming back is allowing oneself the luxury of rediscovering the wonder in a child’s eyes, it’s seeing the seasons return each time as if it were the first time, it’s the freedom of a thought that doesn’t need immediate utility, like when writing a poem, a love letter, or an article here on the blog.
All this coming back cannot help but bring to mind the return of Ulysses, the cunning and intelligent hero who, after extraordinary adventures and encounters with the marvelous, yearned to find his Ithaca, his Penelope, and his previous life.
The “coming back” I’m talking about, on the contrary, is a ceaseless movement, a re-entry that constantly sees us different, almost “Anti-Ulysses.”
Every immersion in the world transforms us, or should, and we are not the same ones who crossed the threshold of home in the morning and who look at themselves in the hallway mirror. We don’t come back to be the same, but to be “more.”
Coming back as an act of continuous reinvention. It’s seeing with ever-new eyes that tree in front of our house, betting on the color the leaves will have each time they return.
Maria Giubettini
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