So about 2 years ago, I moved away. Broken spirit broken person, over 3000 miles. However, yesterday I landed for my first visit back here. And I just feel weird. Like I’m not supposed to be here or something, it’s very ominous. I constantly feel anxious.
The weirdest thing was seeing how my parents have started to age. And the woods where I used to hang out are all housing developments now. I’m currently sleeping on a mattress in my old room, aka the office now, surrounded by random shelving and printers and stuff. it’s really a weird feeling in here too.
I don’t know what I expected but I definitely don’t feel like I’m “home”. It’s like some weird alternate dimension version of home. There’s still some people I’m yet to see and I wonder how that’s gonna go. So far everything already feels uncomfortably different. Alongside that, the rose tint has also come off and I have a lot of bad memories going through my head too instead of any sort of nostalgia. Almost like the different person I was back then is still lurking here somewhere watching me.
Anyone familiar with such a feeling, after being away for so long?
I’ve been away from the UK for a couple of decades. I don’t feel especially at home anywhere any more. The first time I went back the homesickness was far stronger than I expected. The last time I went back, I realized I have a North American vocabulary now and I speak with a different inflection than the locals. I hope I don’t have too horrible a mid-Atlantic accent. But it made me feel like I don’t fit in there, and I never quite feel like I fit in here. Plus there’s the disconcerting way it looks like home but the town and the people have all changed so it feels like I just arrived from the past. I don’t get the pop culture references any more, the country is contending with different problems, and the politics is unfamiliar except in broad outline. It is a weird feeling. But in a sense it’s good because it clarifies that “home” is something imaginary based on memory, not a physical place, and in reality everything changes. If I had stayed in the same place that might not have become so clear.