After We Leave

When I was a kid, I wanted to run away from my hometown.
The boredom.
The quiet neighborhood that seemed to have nothing.
A place that never seemed to notice me.

Over the last two years, I’ve fallen in love with this city again—
now transformed into everything it wasn’t when I was a child.

There is no other place where you can sit in a hipster coffee shop
and have my mother point and say:
that used to be the greenhouse,
that was the laundromat,
this was the bus stop —
until I remind myself she’s already told me all this
more than once.

Author: Renee Newlon

I am a Turkish American writer and photographer. I work in short-form prose, poetic fragments, and photography. I don’t photograph the event; I photograph the moment after the event. A few things that stay with me: Plato’s Cave, Oberg’s Culture Shock, and Beethoven’s Ever thine. Ever mine. Ever ours. My greatest teacher was my college philosophy professor, Sister Jane Sullivan, who taught me how to think and how to see. View all posts by Renee Newlon