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24 September 2026

There are places we leave behind but somehow never really leave.

It may be a house where we spent our childhood, a school corridor, a railway platform, or simply a road we walked every day without giving it much thought.

Years later, something brings it back.

A smell. A song. The sound of rain.

And suddenly we are there again.

I sometimes think memory does not preserve places exactly as they were. It keeps the feeling of them. The light through a particular window. Someone calling our name from another room. The sound of a gate opening. An afternoon that seemed ordinary at the time.

Perhaps that is why photographs can sometimes feel strangely incomplete.

They show us what a place looked like.

Memory reminds us what it felt like.

As the years pass, we collect many such places without realising it. Some are far away. Some no longer exist. Some have changed beyond recognition.

But somewhere inside us, they remain just as we first knew them.

Not as addresses.

As pieces of our own story.

Rajat Chandra Sarmah, Guwahati, Assam, India, Instagram @rajatchandrasarmah5, YouTube: conversewithasmile, email rajatchandrasarmah@gmail.com