[begin transmission]

What is this?
Honestly, what am I even doing here?

9,900 km from your everyday life.
You've come all this way with no clear objectives in mind.
This is no point of origin. Nor are there any ties that bind; those have long since decayed.
And yet, you thought it was appropriate to come all this way, shirking duties on the home front.

For what? To be stricken with your typical melancholy and moodiness?
No, no, no. No. Don't start with that kind of talk. You know damn well what you came here for.
Articulate it, get those thoughts out as best as you possibly can. Write it out.
Worry about clarity later; get those fingers moving; off-load mental content into the environment.

There is sentimental value attached to this place, that keeps you coming back, reliably.
True, you don't have any business to tend to here. But no one said this was a business trip.
No friends nor family to visit either; that rules out traveling for leisure.
The roads are as engraved into your psyche as they are well-traveled; this isn't a tourist vacation.

Yet there is a good, compelling reason for why you are here. Else you wouldn't have made the trip.
What is it?

There is something so incredibly enduring about this place.
The sense of kinship I have to the locale, despite nothing being here for me.
Upon initial inspection it's certainly something to do with memory.
That's to be expected though. You spent the majority of your life here.

You visited the schoolyards, storefronts, backroads, cafes, cathedrals, and plazas of your adolescence.
The ones that still remain, anyway. Time's arrow neither stands still nor reverses.
Odd reference to have dance into mind, but the wisdom behind the phrase rings true.
The mausoleums, cemeteries, and gravestones visited stand in testament to that knowledge.

This is something more than mere nostalgia at play, however.
Were it so simple. Then, at the very least, the feeling could be relatively satiated
This is something else, something a little less easy to describe exactly.
My best approximation is...gratitude.

I made this journey out of a sense of gratitude. Okay, gratitude for what and to whom?
Immediately obvious are my recent achievements, which I attribute to my parents.
Not because they did it for me, of course, but because they made the possibility, possible.
Without them, I'd literally not be the person I am, today. Probably much worse. Or dead.

To them, I owe my life and all of my accomplishments. Despite everything that has happened.
All the bitterness and resentment that shouldn't exist between mother and child.
All of the regrettable, hurtful exchanges and painful rejection and denouncement.
I still love them dearly. That will never, ever change. No matter how much I might think otherwise.

But even then, that doesn't quite add up. Your parents are not here.
That gratitude is somehow inextricably tied to the very land you sit upon.
It's baked into the bleached, powdery, white sand under the impromptu picnic you've prepared.
To see how far you've made it, given the sub-optimal preconditions, graduating step-by-step...

...Stop. You need to work that thought out and develop it.
That was shameful, ▒▒▒▒▒▒. To try and brush it under the rug.
You're not being very honest. You're hiding something you don't want to admit to.
Confront that thought, ugly and wretched as it's implications might be.

You really are a silly little doll, aren't you?
So eager for strife that you'd recruit yourself as an enemy saboteur of the worst kind.
There is something that is violating your conscience and it is your duty to bring it to focus.
Then, perhaps some utility from this little escape of yours could be derived after all.

[end transmission]