The sun shone down on the gleaming tarmac like a blowtorch on impossible ice as the plane finally came to a stop. England once more! the land of my fathers, the world to which I was born and bourne again. here was my homeland, estranged for so many years! here lay my chance at normality.

alas, it was not to be. I had been gone too long and experienced too much. how can life be the same when you leave a child and return years later, your innocence shattered and torn and buffetted by the storms through which you have struggled? still, here is a fact I could not accept, as I joyously ran back into what I thought to be an old and comfortingly simple life. images of the past 5 years were banished from my mind as a bad dream and for a week all was right with the world, and would have remained as such…

but for time.
Time has a way of stealing happiness, of tarnishing memory.
Time moves ever forwards.