Some places are scars

I'm writing these lines alongside a checklist , my passport, and postcards of Java taken by a photographer friend. As I prepare for a multi-month trip to Asia, I'm overcome with that familiar enthusiasm for discovery and exploration that only arises when you're setting out to visit new, and especially remote, places.

However, there are other places just a few miles from home where experiences also await rediscovering. Or, rather, reconciling you, like old scars.

And the fact is that we're all maps filled with places that provide emotional anchors. For better or for worse.

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There are coastal towns we associate with the happiness of that summer love, but also the neighborhood in that city where our hearts were broken. In my case, one of those anchor places is the town in Alicante where I spent my childhood summers with my grandparents and my mother, so closely linked to bright, traditional memories, but also gray because they are no longer with us, among other reasons.

It's a town I never like to return to, but where, by chance, I ended up a few days ago after spending a weekend at a cultural estate.

During the three hours I have to wait for my bus, I can't help but get lost in the narrow streets of the old town that lead to the top of the castle. Along the way, there's a one-piece chair next to a door full of flower pots, the curled-up cats on the windowsills, and the old washhouse I used to go to as a child.

Upon reaching the top of the castle, amidst the colorful pennants celebrating the San Ramón festivals, which remind me so much of my childhood, I recognize the terrace below where my grandmother used to make soap while butterflies followed her. I always find it curious to think that we travel to other, distant places to find ourselves when we can return to the nearby refuges we thought we'd forgotten.

It's August, and there's no one left in the village at two in the afternoon, except for three men in straw hats talking on a sidewalk while the hot wind carries plant debris. I sit down at a bar I've never seen before, and while I'm devouring a plate of breaded chicken breast, an older man asks if the chair is taken. I tell him no, but contrary to what I initially thought, he sits at my table and begins to tell me about the village, the neighbors, and this year's table grape harvest. After chatting for a few minutes, I discover that this man with the ghostly aura knew my grandmother and my mother, and for a moment, he reminds me of the things you forget: the aroma of fried cod cakes coming from the kitchen, and even the voices that were trapped in old seashells.

Ten minutes until the bus, I head back down the castle alley to once again look out over that old familiar rooftop. I don't know what awaits me in Indonesia, but staying nearby can sometimes also be a trip to distant memory lanes. To that terrace where my grandmother no longer makes soap, but where butterflies still linger.