So here I am again. Twenty-five years after our big yellow moving truck pulled into town after a four-day drive from Toronto - Dad driving, Mom in the passenger seat, me folded between them, probably clutching Pat the Bear. Twenty years since my Dad moved east again, to Ottawa, for work, and nineteen years since my Mom and I followed. Ten years since my last visit.

I've been in town for less than an hour. I'm sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the school I attended for three years in the late 1980s. Maybe four blocks from our old house. Three blocks from the food co-op where we shopped - it's still there, though nothing much else on the street looks familiar. And I can't tell if it's the memories or the two coffees on an empty stomach that are making the acid in my stomach rise like the tide, my ears ring just a little.

My memories of our life in Saskatoon are still vivid, still vital - but also weirdly disconnected, loose and floating, separate in some way from my present self, as though the person I am today didn't really grow out of them at all. And maybe that's it. I can remember that girl clearly, the happy, confident one, but after we moved to Ottawa I was so angry and so self-conscious, for so long, that the image of the old me eventually became a picture of a stranger.

I never really let go of Saskatoon after we moved. For the first year or two in Ottawa I was angrier than you'd think an eight-year-old could be. I sulked and buried myself in books and plotted my escape. I applied my new-minted multiplication skills to calculating how long it would take me to save for a plane ticket back - my allowance was 50 cents a week - or, alternatively, how long it would take me to walk 3000 kilometers. (My best friend Jillian swore I could live in her closet. Her parents would never know.) My diary was dark and full of rage against the many spoiled, cruel shits at my new school - one memorable entry: "I fucking hate everyone in fucking Ottawa!!!" Sometimes my low-simmering frustration would boil over and I'd make a break from the school yard, sprinting down the block until one of the yard monitors ran me down.

An armchair psycho-analyst might observe that the move to Ottawa coincided almost exactly with my parents' divorce. Could it be, said amateur shrink would no doubt ask, that you weren't really angry about the move? But I don't think it was a matter of displacement. I can remember a completely distinct thought process surrounding the split, and besides, I had plenty of good reasons for my Ottawa-rage - I had landed in a socially stratified hell for which I was completely unprepared.

Sure, my school in Saskatoon had its winners and losers, as any large group of children - people? - will. But I can't remember anyone here knowing - or caring - about whose parents did what, who lived where, who wore which brands of clothing. Those calculations were still years away for us. But for the precocious kids in my new neighborhood, it was all fair game. I was one of maybe three kids in my grade who lived in rental housing, had divorced parents, and didn't have a season-long ski pass or a wardrobe from The Gap. And - this was news to me - those things mattered. My prairie origins didn't help, either. I can still remember the sneering girl in my class who told me to "just go back to your own country." (Confusion, indignation, anger: "This bitch thinks she's better than me, and she can't even name all ten provinces?")

All that to say: Ottawa was never really home to me. I held on to Saskatoon, and to my slowly subsiding anger, until I left town at the end of high school, and found a new home in Halifax. My years in Nova Scotia cured me of all that rage, finally, but they also spelled the end of my long-held belief that I would come back here eventually, for good. That I was meant to get back and pick up the pieces where I'd left them.

This is the first time I've been back since I finally accepted that I will almost certainly never live here again. My three best friends from my Saskatoon years are still here - we kept in touch all along - and I'll see all of them again this weekend. I'm not sure what it will mean, how it will feel, seeing them, now that I've moved on. Despite the empty-latte-stomach, I'm looking forward to finding out.