i.
The walk to the bus stop is an additional fifteen meters in the rain, another two point five milliliters of water soaked into your socks, and an immeasurable amount of precipitation falling from the sky onto the grey concrete of the streets in front of you.
There is rain spilling over the roof of the small shelter you have just stepped under. You remember the path ahead - a dark grey drain cover every two meters on the pavement next to the tar black road, light grey metallic bus stop, a stray green dustbin by the roadside, in dissonance with the rest of the nondescript sky - a leaking tap today, smudging today into a swirl of dirty grey confusion, as if everything were watercolor, easily dissolved.
You aren't sure what you came back here for. But perhaps if you wiped the warm mist that has formed over your glasses on this cold rainy day you might be able to see clearly enough to find out.
ii.
Ninety degrees to your right is a façade of black and red and white tessellating, forming the front of a community center. There is a fast food restaurant in that building – only this you remember from the day you were twelve with a sudden craving for French fries.
A hundred and eighty degrees and it's another bus stop. You recall a heated day, the harsh cadences of voices, sound waves passing through one another displacing particles. You remember being eleven and just wanting to go home.
Two hundred and seventy degrees and thirty-seven paces forward will be the grey gate – brown by now you imagine – tarnished by rain, last flakes of blue paint peeling off. You could climb over it if you wanted to. It's the sort of thing you'd have done when you were ten and unaware of consequences, of dangers. You could imagine your teacher sighing and making a remark about being new here in the school and managing to get into trouble in mere months.
It's just a building now. Without hesitating you turn back and walk away, braving the rain to that bus stop. Where the contrary green dustbin that tells you this is the way home.
iii.
It is an acute sense of loss you feel as you leave, but then again, what did you expect, anyway? Memory, that penrose staircase that extends infinitely forward in front of you, grows with every single step forward, the future indistinguishable from the past.