No Postcards (by Laurie Faria Stolarz)
We don’t always realize it at the time, but the places that shape us are rarely grand. They’re smaller, quieter, stitched into the fabric of everyday life. Looking back, the map of my youth isn’t organized by postcard destinations, but by feeling. Each place holds a version of me, preserved in motion. There was the broken wall. It stood where a house had once been, long before my time. By the time I found it, all that remained was a stretch of concrete—cracked, weather-worn, and layered with years of tagging and graffiti. Thick bubble letters overlapped in faded reds and blues, names half-scratched out and rewritten. The wall came up to about my hips, just high enough to lean on, just low enough to see over. From there, you could catch a partial view of the neighborhood: backyards with rusting swing sets, chain-link fences, a dog that barked at everything. My older brother had spent time there before me, which made it feel almost inherited, like a quiet rite of passage. Sometimes ...
