eyes that only see once

Every time I come back to my house from a trip I attempt to see my neighborhood the way I saw it the first time I moved it - raucous, confusing, multivalent - but it always slips back into it's usual clothing as Home. It makes me nostalgic for early childhood, before I understood typology, when my stair was the only Stair, my TV the only TV. Going to a friends house produced the kind of culture shock now only attained through international travel: you mean this is dinner? You have two dogs? Your basement floor is concrete?

Eventually my friends places became as recognisable as my own, and school, and the mall, home creeping out to eventually encompass most of the city itself, and now parts of New York, San Diego, Houston, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, and Paris. As my domestic geography grows, the perimeter gets farther and farther away, but also longer, such that it is harder to find something with the shock of the new, but should I decide to make that trek, my options are nearly unlimited.