You cannot be the same person who once left that place

A bizarre and scary part about growing up is experiencing your home as a visitor, rather than a resident.

It just kind of happens one day. You come back home for a holiday or a long weekend, and you realize that may of the things you used to find comfort in, aren’t there anymore.

Or they are still there, but they just don’t do it for you anymore.

Like that pizza place you used to love. When you were a kid, their thin crust extra cheese pie was the greatest thing that ever was. But as an adult, it tastes like ketchup on a cracker.

Blech. Makes you want to spend the rest of the night stewing in rage and disgust. Feeling homesick for a place that doesn’t even exist anymore.

Wolfe famously wrote an entire book about this, published posthumously in the early forties. His theory was:

You can never go home again. You can’t go back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time. You can’t go back home to the escapes of time and memory.

Sounds like a modern version of the ancient mantra, you can never step into the same river twice.

The question is, what changed more? The person or the place?

Because although the home that you remember doesn’t really exist anymore, the version of you from the days that you remember doesn’t exist anymore either.

That’s the scary part. You feel like you can never get either one of them back. The person or the place.

A friend of mine jokes that coming home is the only real form of time travel. Like one of those science fiction movies where the character experiences severe time dilation as a result of having traveled faster than the speed of light.

Have you ever felt that way when coming home? You return and see everything differently, but everyone that you know is continuing on with their lives like nothing has changed?

It’s deeply alienating. You almost feel like a ghost. Like a skeletal version of yourself.

My guess is, all of these feelings are connected to the fear of change, which is code for the fear of death.

LET ME ASK YA THIS…
What if a family was nothing more than a group of people who missed the same imaginary place?