Visiting him is never just about visiting. It’s about shedding skin. Forcefully removing parts of you he does not approve, leaving it behind as if it was just a jacket you chose not to bring for the trip. It’s like tearing off the callouses you built overtime that has protected you from the wars you had to face alone. Then you’re naked once again, like a child, naive and innocent, easily wounded and easily offended. Ground zero.
It’s about reliving the chapters you have left behind, reopening the wounds you sewed. And suddenly, you’re transported back there, standing still in the outpour of rain. And by the time you go back to retrieve your skin, you find it no longer fits. The jacket you left behind has grown bigger, and you have to spend who knows how long reconfiguring yourself once again to fit into the jacket you left behind. The skin that was once yours no longer familiar, no longer yours. And you hurt, you cry, you recover all over again. Sew the wounds all over again. Rebuild all over again, only to find that what has been rebuilt is not the same as what you left behind. It’s a different skin, a different jacket, a different version of you. Nobody recovers the same way twice. In the end you have shed so many skins, so many layers of you, that you no longer recognize your true form. Because you keep changing, and changing, and changing, over and over. Healing and changing. Hurting and changing. That the only way you know how to live now is to change.
That has been my life. An endless cycle of change and reinvention. I’m stuck in a loop that was never meant to have a destination.
So no, it’s never just a “visit”.