late train passing through—
windows full of other lives,
mine stays in its seat
—
In the autumn of 2011, I rented a short-term flat in a narrow building by the Limmat, just east of the city center in Zürich. It was the kind of apartment that came already furnished—mostly in muted wood, with a mattress too thin and a single cup in the cupboard that looked like it had outlived something important.
There was a clock in the hallway outside my door that ticked a little too loud. And at night, when the rest of the world had gone quiet, that ticking became its own kind of rhythm. A sound that didn’t ask anything of me. Just kept moving. Forward, always.
I had come back to the city for reasons I couldn’t fully explain. I told people it was to rest. To write. To pause between things. But the truth sat somewhere underneath that. I was circling around a place I didn’t want to enter again. A place I’d once called home. Not physically—though the apartment wasn’t far from it—but emotionally, internally. That version of home. The one where I had learned how to keep myself small and silent, like a plant growing in a dark cupboard.
And though I walked through many familiar streets that season—through Langstrasse in the early morning, where the clubs still echoed with music nobody remembered; through the stillness of Lindenhof, where pigeons always seemed to gather in odd numbers—I never walked back to that home. I never rang the bell.
—
I think we talk too casually about going back.
“Go home.”
“Reconnect.”
“Make peace with your past.”
But some places aren’t meant to be revisited.
Not because they’re evil.
But because returning to them requires you to become small again. To shapeshift.
And when you’ve worked this hard to become whole,
you learn not to volunteer for that kind of shrinking.
—
There’s a version of me that still lives in that house.
Quiet. Agreeable. Careful not to take up too much room.
The version that said yes too easily, that swallowed her own voice before it made a sound.
She knew how to keep the peace.
She knew how to explain away her discomfort until it looked like gratitude.
And some days, I can still feel her pressing at the edge of my chest—
when I’m too polite in a meeting,
when I downplay my joy,
when I write something true and almost delete it.
But I don’t let her drive anymore.
I don’t let her pick the routes.
Because I remember what she forgot:
that survival isn’t the same as living.
That not being hurt is not the same as being loved.
—
One night, while the rain turned the windows silver and the city took on that quiet, heavy stillness it gets when everyone’s inside waiting for the storm to pass, I made tea in the kitchen and sat on the floor, because I didn’t trust the chair not to collapse.
I remember looking at the steam rising from the cup and thinking:
Maybe this is it. Maybe this moment—this silence, this tea, this rented room—is more home than anywhere I’ve ever lived.
Not because it was perfect.
But because nothing in it asked me to be anything but myself.
That’s when I realized:
I don’t need to go back to forgive.
I don’t need to revisit the rooms that taught me to disappear.
I don’t need to knock on doors I once closed to prove I’m healed.
Sometimes growth looks like leaving.
Sometimes healing is the absence of the thing that once held you tight.
And sometimes the kindest thing you can do for the person you used to be is to let them stay behind—safe in memory, untouched by the present.
—
I haven’t returned to that home.
Not in all the years since.
Not even by accident.
And when people ask me what place I never want to visit,
I think of that apartment.
That old kettle.
That ticking clock.
I think of the version of me who lived in a house where her joy was too loud, where her no was negotiable, where her fear had its own room.
And I say—
Not there.
Not because I’m bitter.
Not because I hate it.
But because I don’t belong there anymore.
And maybe that’s what growing means.
Not becoming someone new,
but gently, finally,
refusing to become someone you’re not.
life 