Places become chapters because memory needs scenery.

Your life does not divide itself by years so much as by settings. The apartment years, the years by the coast, the time in that one house. Memory needs a backdrop to organize itself against, and place is the most reliable backdrop available.

This is worth knowing when a chapter is ending. Some of the grief in leaving is really about closing a section of your own history. Naming what that chapter contained makes the move feel less like losing it and more like finishing it properly.