The Place You Pictured and the Place That Is There Now

Five years is a long time to carry a plan that is not working.

By Neil Solomon · 3 min read

Picture a couple named Roger and Anita. Years ago they fell for a coastal corner of India. They came back with a plan: a small guesthouse, a few rooms, breakfast on the terrace. They gave it five years. The guesthouse never opened.

I came across a story shaped like theirs, set in the 1980s. What stands out to me is not the plan failing. Plans fail all the time. What stands out is how long the dream stayed alive after the plan was gone, and how strained those years felt while the couple tried to make it fit.

I think this is a risk that belongs to people who have loved a place for a long time. The picture in your head has a date on it. The place has moved on, and so have you. Neither of you is the same as in that first visit. A friend's tale of a perfect year, a film, a holiday long ago: these are all snapshots. A snapshot does not tell you what a Tuesday looks like in the fifth year.

Reading the time in a dream

When I think about how long a stay might last, I find it helps to ask three small things about the picture itself. How old is it? Whose eyes did it come through? Did anyone in it have to deal with paperwork, repairs or waiting? Often the answer to the last one is no. Holiday memories have no waiting in them.

That does not make the dream wrong. It means the first year is for checking the picture against the place, not for building on it. A couple who rents for a season before they sign for anything learns more than a couple who arrives with a finished plan.

Here is how Roger and Anita might have talked in the second year.

"I thought it would feel like the first trip," Anita said.

"It does, some mornings," Roger said. "Then the afternoon arrives."

There is no blame in that. Nobody lied to them. A place can be warm and kind and still not be the one you remembered.

What I take from it

The strain in these stories seems to come from holding on, not from the place. Five years is a long time to carry a plan that is not working. I think many people would feel relief if someone told them early that changing the plan is a normal part of the move, and that it says nothing about their judgment.

It also seems fair to say that a place from forty years ago and the same place now are two different places that share a name. Reading old accounts is useful for the feeling, less so for the details.