Learning to Love a Place That You Hate
Poem by Leah Browning •
Photo by Steve Rice
 You try to see only the good things:a cup of tea on a dim winter morning, the muted silence in the street after snowfall, tree branches turned a temporary white before a pale, watery-eyed sun forces up its head. With time, you grow into this, like a plant growing into a bottle; you take its shape. The grocery, once tiny and inadequate, becomes homey; quiet reticence begins to seem normal. Then all you are able to see are the good things, and the vehemence with which you once looked at this world seems a distant memory. In summer, when you are rubbing bug spray on the children, it’s with a sense of camaraderie. Yet you are still inside the bottle you devised, viewing the world through a particular lens, and from this perspective you are increasingly aware of how you will remember each individual thing after you are gone—each leaf that you rake, each long, lazy day of summer—and you realize far too late that you can never reverse this process, that the damage has already been done: you are swollen with love for the place, and the thought of leaving it fills you with nothing but regret. |