Childshead Revisited

It's been a long time since I left Dumbarton. 13 years, actually, which means I spent half my life there, growing up, and the other half everywhere else, growing up faster.

I've never remembered it as being as beautiful as it was today when, on the spur of the moment, an afternoon with my little-seen mum and sister turned into a trip in a direction we're not used to.

For the first time in thirteen years, all three of us were together in this town that felt so big at the time and yet today felt so compact. The scale of everything has changed - nothing's as big as I remember it or as it appears in my dreams. The entire afternoon tugged at me. Like imagining an alternate reality of somewhere your heart knows so well. It's hard to see where the person I am now, wounded and stronger and insecure and homosexual and creative and loaded with baggage, could ever have had a place in this place that's triggering so many things I didn't realise I'd forgotten.

Things have moved on since the summer of 2000. But, as I was surprised and delighted to find out, part of me obviously never will.