Well I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you, but time makes us bolder, children get older, I'm getting older too

In my Major Authors of American Literature class we have just moved onto the poet Nastasha Trethewey. Her collection of poems, Native Guard is a predominantly autobiographical series, focusing on the death of Trethewey's mother and the Native Guard, an African-American battalion who fought in the American Civil War.

My Professor pulled out the first poem in the collection: Theories of Time and Space and the class entered into a dicussion about the first two lines:

'You can get there from here, though

there's no going home.'

My Professor commented on the idea that once you leave somewhere, you can never really go back again. The experiences you gain from the place you have moved to will have changed you, even if you think they haven't. Once you return to the place you came from, you realise you have changed and nothing or no-one there has.

I didn't know whether to take this as a positive or negative notion. Is it a good thing that once you leave home, you change and grow and your home starts to become just the place where you grew up? Or is it sad that we're quick to leave behind the places we grew up in, in search of a place we believe to be better and more exciting?

I'd like to believe that it's a good thing to leave home and see the world. I'd like to believe that my experiences this year will help me to become a more able person. I hope that my return to England over the Christmas vacation will answer these questions. But I fear that I will have changed too much to appreciate what I think I miss so much about home. I have got here, but in coming here, there's no going home to what I remember it to be.