Weight of Return

He bought another round with the money he had earned & the money he had stolen. The organist told him he didn't practice anymore but wandered around the city, trying to replace the conversations he had in his life with the ones he had imagined, wondering if he should someday return to Estonia, pretend like it's home again, return to that fallen tree near the border where he sat & stared at the tangled snow trails of hunters long passed through that rose up from the valley, return to faith to ease the final phase of entropy. He asked him if he wanted to return to the States & he said he never thought about it, never had the desire to return to anything. We unknowingly tread circles again & again. The days repeat themselves of their own accord. Why would anyone choose to return? But the repetition of life, the organist replied, is an illusion. When I returned home after circling through Russia for years, the world I had abandoned was completely altered, the only pieces that remained were the ones which terrified me & I knew it was never my home in the first place. It wasn't a circle that I had tread, but another path I had to untangle. If nowhere you return to is the same as it was before you left it, then maybe the nothingness after death is different than the nothingness before birth.