FebulousFebruary 2025: Lost and Found

Part 2 (b) – Extract

I left broken and returned grown. My journey home.

A lot of change has taken place. In me.

A lot of change has taken place in me.

A different mindset. 

I feel like…me …again. 

A sequence of events led to me being in London last night. 

At 2am on my son’s sofa (they offered me the bed…Gabbie will kill me if I don’t mention that part) I lay there listening to a noise I had not heard for years…. London. Noises and hustle that I had not heard in so long…and have needed.

My alarm went of at 7 and I just lay there. I was so tired, and I thought…I can’t do it. Na…I’m just gonna go back home.

And that’s when it hit me. On that sofa….7 o’clock this morning. Where is “Home” exactly? Because from the second I stepped out of the train station at St Pancras I felt different. I felt…comfortable. I don’t feel like that in Kent. Ever. 

I feel like an outsider. Like a kid hanging around a group …. kind of included…but not really. You’re not really one of them. 

But here …on this sofa…right now…. I felt like me. Anyway…I needed to go and get her……

And so, the journey began. I got ready and me and my son left. He walked out of his block of flats with me…. dressed in his shirt jumper and tie…. clearly at ease with not only his environment but also himself. Something I had not seen in him for a long time. My son…dressed all smart for his government job…The son born on these streets… born on Clapham manor street…. just walking beside me casually taking me to the bus stop as he headed off in the opposite direction for his job. We hugged and he left, and I watched him walk with ease within the crowd. I watched him cross the road, in his own world. Relaxed and set for the day. The boy they told me I could not keep. The one who so many said would not achieve….and here he was…home…living a life I could only dream of at his age.

And that was the first cry. Sitting at the top of the bus, on the way to Clapham junction, crying behind my sunglasses. Because I have obviously done something right if he is holding his own…and well….in the same environment that once broke us all. I stopped crying just before junction and realised I would have to keep my sunglasses on until I found a mirror now.

I got off at Junction and was struck by how different and the same everything was at the same time. The landscape was the same…there was Arding and Hobbs…. there was JD…no wait……that’s a bank now….and off I went, taking in Clapham junction for the first time in a long time. A million memories hitting me at once and halfway down the high street I had a rush of panic. Its too much. SO much. If I turn back now, I can get the train home from Junction. And then I felt it…. a voice…a feeling. I don’t know how to explain it. Like a whisper….” what about me” and in my head I said …Ok…I’m coming.

“There you are” slipped out my mouth with love. Like I had seen an old forgotten friend. But what I had seen…was Clapham common. The trees…the grass….

And I ran…

Like a loon in flip flops

I ran onto the common and just threw my head up to the sky and took a deep breath.

And cried.

I took of my flip flops and just stood with the grass under my feet. I took off my sunglasses (All vanity gone) and it was electric. Everything looked so green and new and …. home. I just started walking and realised something…. all the trees were the same. I can’t explain what I mean (and this will be a theme so be warned) bit I recognised trees. I had played on this common my whole childhood….my teens…until I was 28. And so, I had trees that were landmarks…and didn’t even realise. 

I spent ages walking from one place to another, places…spaces….and the whole time that feeling…. of a kid saying…look…oh look at that one….no look at this one…. was becoming stronger.

I stopped even planning where I was going at one point and just went with her. She obviously knew what we needed to see. Like wind…. I could just feel where I needed to go.

Not to the flat

Not yet

I found myself at the boating pond and I felt like I needed to stop a moment.  I sat in the place where I had sat many times. And I realised that I had been walking for 2 hours solid. And that I had passed quite a few places where good memories were and also where bad memories were…. but…. I was able to acknowledge the bad ones and just move on. Not ignore. Not all. But…. We didn’t come to feel that…. she said….

And all of a sudden it was time. I was just sitting at the boating pond, reminiscing and suddenly it was like…right…. it’s time to go to the flat…. come on. 

Tears running down my face in the middle of big Sainsburys (Only OGs will know its big Sainsburys). Crying. Like a baby.

Why

Because I had come to get my mum’s flowers.

Well…. I could not go home and not take her flowers. Because I always get her flowers.

Kendra Houseman 

Kent

(to be continued Day 24 of FabulousFebruary)