I Still Own Every Backyard I Walk Into

 
I Still Own Every Backyard I Walk Into

A story of six, and every age that followed...

I put the sunglasses on myself. Nobody had to ask me to. I just knew the moment called for them, and this one did. New yard, new fence, new everything. I planted my feet in the grass, put my hands on my hips, and decided: this place was mine now.

I didn't know, of course, about the boxes packed in a hurry, or the conversations held behind closed doors that led to the morning we loaded the car again. All I knew was that there was a chain-link fence to press my face against, a rose bush taller than my head, and an orange flower — one single one — blooming right there in the middle of all that wild green. A good sign, I figured. Places with flowers were good places.

There had been other yards before this one. I remembered them in pieces — the creak of a particular porch step, the smell of someone else's grass after rain, a neighbor's dog that barked every evening like clockwork. Each place left something small in me without asking permission. I didn't file these things away on purpose. They just settled, the way light settles into a room through a window you forgot was open.

I didn't carry addresses like weights, the way the grown-ups seemed to. I carried them as a catalog — what the sky looked like from here, where the sun hit in the afternoon, what sounds meant it was time to come inside. Every place was just another chapter of the world I was collecting. I didn't know then that I would never stop.

· · ·

I still do it. Walk into a new city and immediately stake a quiet claim on it. I learn the way a neighborhood smells before rain, which café lets you sit for hours without guilt, where the locals go when they don't want to be found by anyone like me. I go deep, not wide — I want the texture of a place, not just its postcard version. I want the person at the market who tells me something true without meaning to.

I photograph what I find. Not always the grand thing — more often the small one. A shadow on a wall. A table for two that nobody is sitting at. The light at a particular hour in a particular window of a city I may never return to. I have learned that a photograph is a way of saying I was here and this mattered, even when I can't yet explain why.

I talk to strangers on the road. I have found that people open themselves differently when they know you're passing through — there's a freedom in the temporary, a permission to be honest that permanence sometimes doesn't allow. I have sat across from people in train compartments, bar stools, park benches, and learned more about being alive in one hour than in months of standing still. These people become part of my collection too. Faces I still carry.

The reasons I move have changed. It's not closed doors and packed boxes driving me now — it's something I chose. A creative hunger that needs new light to feed it. Relationships that stretch across cities and time zones and pull me toward them. A restlessness that I've stopped trying to cure because I've realized it's not a wound. It's a compass. And somewhere underneath all of it, still, the quiet desire to find the one orange flower in all that wild green and know: this is a good place.

I was six, standing in a yard I hadn't earned, claiming it anyway with my hands on my hips and my sunglasses on. I didn't know the moves were about something else. All I knew was: new place, mine now. Find the corner. Build something.

Turns out, I never stopped being that kid. I just got better at finding the corners.