i am slow today as i find my old pace in this city. slow up the hills and in the alleyways, slow down the slope to the park and through the fountain. i am slow finding a pace that fits my feet. slow creeping into things, slow leaving. i would have thought i might be faster than this, kept running at the pace i have been, momentum shifting momentum, always forward. i would have thought that i was not weighted from the heels anymore. thought that the sound of breath as it is breathed in was enough, enough to carry me forward. eyes always look so differnt from proximity, and i forgot that, i think, in the passage. i forgot the way things taste and things smell here, the way that things might have been, and i remember you and how we are different. these are the narratives we write in our home town; ones of loss and forgetting, ones of memory. these are the things that we do not want to shape us, but do. these are the things that we are made of. and it is the way that we interact with the past that makes us new again, not the way we remember it. it is the way that we let it take us, the way that we wear it with daring, the way that it is us and all of us and nothing. it is the way that i feel in this house, against the white walls and the history, the sounds of all the stories we have made here. stories of silence and fried bread thick with salt, of roast beef and crispy potatoes, of sewing dresses and tiny shoes, hats, and bags and fighting.