Chapter 13 · 2 min 47 sec
The Return
Grief that has found its proper place — the presence of the absent, held with dignity.
Lyrics· 247 words
[Verse 1] You have traveled very far now / you have wandered through the maps You have searched in other faces / you have searched in other traps But the thing you went out looking for / was sitting here in place The return is not a failure / the return is the embrace
[Chorus] The return / the return / to the self you always were The return / the return / past the noise and the blur Every road that led away from you / was leading back around The return / the return / is where you're finally found
[Verse 2] The prodigal is sacred / not for leaving but for back For the dawning recognition / of what the journey lacked Not the trophies not the conquering / not the names and not the fire The return to the original / the self before desire
[Chorus] The return / the return / to the self you always were The return / the return / past the noise and the blur Every road that led away from you / was leading back around The return / the return / is where you're finally found
[Bridge - mantra build] Aum / the primordial sound of coming home Aum / the vibration of the throne Aum / the sound that was before the word Aum / the sound that waits to be heard
[Outro] The return / the return / aum / the return / home
Short Story
*You cannot return to who you were. You return to where you belong.*
He hadn't been back in fourteen years.
Not out of hostility — nothing dramatic had happened. He'd left for reasons that seemed clear at twenty-two and became murkier with distance, and time passed, and the murkiness calcified into absence, and absence became the habit.
His mother was ill. He went back.
He drove from the airport through landscapes he'd kept in his memory as one thing and found, in person, to be different — not worse, not better, just changed. The fields in different configurations. The town with different shops in the same buildings.
The house was the same.
His mother was smaller. He'd known this would be true and was still unprepared for it.
They sat in the kitchen for three hours the first afternoon. She told him things she'd wanted to tell him for years. He told her things. The gap was not as large as fourteen years had made it feel from a distance. They were, it turned out, still the same people they had been to each other, only older.
He'd been afraid of what returning would feel like.
It felt like: of course.
Of course this is where I came from. Of course this is what I carry. Of course these are the people who know the early version of me that everyone else is only hearing about secondhand.
He stayed for a month.
It was not a restoration. It was not a return to who he'd been. It was a recognition — of what the home had been, of what it had given him, of what he'd been dragging along for fourteen years and had mistaken for weight when it was actually just origin.
He went back to his own life carrying it more easily.
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*The return is not backward. It is the recognition of where you come from.*
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