Returning to Past

Why does it feel so good to return to places where you once felt hurt and broken, years later, from the quiet distance of what you’ve become? And why do people warn you never to go back to the places where you were once happy and young?

Is it just instinct to soften the pain, preserve the sweetness, to arrange our memories the way Jeremy Bentham would suggest, maximizing pleasure and minimizing suffering? Or is there something more romantic at play, something that resists optimization altogether?

I remember returning once to a brownstone in Flatbush I had occupied for two weeks with two friends and a former romantic partner, on my very first visit to New York. It was my first and never serious relationship, originating in an eighth-grade courtship that lasted longer than it should have. And yet, at the time, it mattered. It mattered enough for us to fight endlessly about the most absurd, obscure things, things only 18-year-olds locked in a dysfunctional romance could find worth unraveling over.

The tension didn’t spare the trip. It didn’t spare our friends or that house, sometimes escalating into day-long silent treatments, into us leaving and going our separate ways with no plan, no explanation.

I still feel apologetic to the friends who traveled with us and had to witness all of it. But who hasn’t been young, passionate, and a little toxic at some point? And if someone hasn’t, I’m not sure I’d want to be stuck in a small, tense space with them.

Years later, after I moved to New York for college, feeling newly alive, alert to the possibilities of a different life, I decided to go back. On one of those most pleasant September Saturday nights the city sometimes offers, instead of dinner or drinks with friends, I took the train from my dorm in Brooklyn Heights to that house in Flatbush for no real reason at all.

I didn’t have the exact address, but I didn’t need it. I remembered the train exit, the turns, the small sequence of movements that led me there in 2012. I stood in front of the dark house that seemed unoccupied for no more than three minutes, just long enough to feel slightly suspicious in the eyes of imagined neighbors, and then I left.

When I got back and told my friend where I’d been, she asked why I would go there in the first place. I remember my answer exactly. I said: “I guess sometimes we like to hurt ourselves for no particular reason.”

But that wasn’t true. I didn’t feel hurt standing there. Not even a trace of nostalgia. What I felt, though I didn’t admit it then, was something closer to relief, even a quiet kind of exhilaration. I was no longer that heartbroken, directionless teenager. I was someone else: a young woman who had chosen to start over in a foreign country, to build a life, to see if this place could one day become something like home.

Maybe returning to a place of past hurt isn’t about the place at all, but about witnessing yourself in it, no longer undone. And maybe avoiding the places of former happiness is less about superstition and more about protecting something fragile, like an unwillingness to watch it shift, age, or disappear.

It doesn’t feel mechanical. It feels like proof that we’re not just trying to optimize our lives but to understand them, to feel their full weight, even when it contradicts us.