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What does it mean when the world you know passed on into the past?

I visited home for the first time in a long time today.

Nothing is the same.

It’s like a different world. It’s like the world I once knew only existed in my mind. And no one else acts like this is weird.

I walked through the door into my old childhood home. Why does it still feel so much like home? Why does it feel simultaneously so alien?

I sat down at the kitchen table. Well, it was a kitchen table. The table that was in my parents’ kitchen. The old table with the leg that wobbled and the chair that creaked is gone.

Dad asked if I wanted some sparkling water. We never had that before, but Mom’s a vegan now and Dad’s doctor told him to give up pop. I thanked him for it.

He told me he found a box of my stuff in the basement and put it in my old room. Also, he said, would I want to go to my cousin’s football game? He sits on the bench but it would be good for us all to be there to support him. Of course, I agreed.

I went to put my bag in my old room. My old bed was long gone. I had taken it with me but then replaced it with a better one. My parents had put a guest bed in here. I was now that guest.

I decided to go for a walk around town.

I walked down the street, past yards and houses that were almost familiar. Nothing had drastically changed, but things were different. A tree that had been cut down, a hedge that had been planted, different decor and furniture sat on a porch- probably a new owner. All of these small changes betrayed the veneer of stasis that I had imagined to be there.

I came to the fountain that runs where my old street met Main. The town had redone the outside edge of the fountain. There didn’t used to be a pool; it used to just be flat and open with drains for the water to run down. Too many dumb kids like me had tried to run through it, and the town had had to build an outside wall around it. There was still a fountain there, but it wasn’t the same fountain where I had broken my foot that one summer. Did that even happen? Why was it such a thrill to run through the water? I can’t remember; I can’t feel that anymore.

The library on the square still looks the same. I pulled the heavy wooden door and entered. That musty book smell made the air feel heavy and intimately familiar. Stepping through that door was like stepping through a curtain into the past.

I wandered the stacks, looking at dusty spines with faded titles. How many hours had I spent wandering between these shelves, looking for something that piqued my interest? I selected a random book and pulled it down from a shelf. It was a text on historical religious conflicts, written almost a century ago. How long had this been sitting here waiting for someone to pick it up?

I left the library and turned down another side street. As I rounded the corner, I could see the empty lot where Grandma’s house used to be. Her house had always smelled the same. Dad and I used to visit her on Fridays, and we would walk down the street to pick up a pizza, except now, Grandma’s dead, her house has been torn down, and the pizza place is closed.

I kept walking and passed the church where I had been baptized. There was a new minister now, Mom had told me. The last time I had been in there had been for a wedding, I think? No one there had recognized me. I considered going inside, but decided against it. I continued on down the street.

I made a loop around town, and returned home. I made a necessary stop in the bathroom. Mom still bought the same kind of soap she always had. It smelled the same as it always had. For a brief instant, that took me back to the place that used to be here. But when I opened the door and saw the wholly different house on the other side, I snapped back to the reality of the now.

Later that night, we went to my cousin’s football game. It was the first time I had been at that school since the day I graduated. Graduation was a fuzzy memory now. It feels less like I walked across the stage in the gym, and more like I watched some other skinny, acne-faced kid do so.

I wouldn’t say high school had been great. Friendships and routine had been good, but there are parts of one’s teenage years best left behind. What really bothered me was the inability to return to the world of the past. It felt restricting. Suffocating, even. To be unable to experience any of that again if I wanted to, was something I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around.

The fact that that past now seemed so distant filled me with dread. It felt like the me that had once existed no longer existed. And the led to the realization that the me that exists now would similarly cease to exist at some point. Someday, future me would look back on now and feel the same way as present me does looking on the past.

Back then, I thought a lot about the future. But I imagined it as a better version of the present. Now that the future is here, it’s both the same quality as the then-present, but also totally different.

It’s just another time and another place. Is it better, worse? Who can say? Visions of the past are clouded by nostalgia and visions of the future are clouded by hope. What clouds the present? Visions of the past and future, maybe? I don’t know, but I’m sure it’s cloudy.

There were students cheering in one section of the bleachers. It was surreal to watch. They were the same kids as had sat there with me when I sat there, but totally different individuals. Sure, you had the cool kids decked out in the school’s colors, the nerds sitting near the back, talking about something unrelated to the game, the burnouts sneaking cigarettes over by the dumpster.

But none of the familiar faces. Was that what we looked like back then, from the outside looking in? Had there been some old alumnus sitting there pondering his own existential crisis while I had been sitting there, carefree and naive so long ago?

My phone rang and so I ducked out of the bleachers to the parking lot to call them back. Something work related. This late on a Friday? Yeah, that sucked. But as I ended the call, I looked around at the twilight landscape around me.

At some point, the street lights had been replaced with LEDs. The burning amber glow that had once saturated this scene was replaced with an antiseptic white.

My eyes traced the shadow of a tall tree over on the edge of the lot. Under that tree, hidden from that amber glow, was where I had first kissed Sophia. We had just been two dumb kids that thought we knew what love was.

I hadn’t even thought about her in years. I thought I heard she got married, but maybe that was someone else? She had been such a big part of my life back then. Now, I didn’t even know how to get in contact with her if I wanted to.

She was probably as much a different person now than I was.

A couple of kids walked out to a car. They were arguing. Why they were arguing didn’t really seem like my concern. I went back up to the bleachers.

How much stupid teenage drama had unfolded in the glow of those lights? And now, the same drama was unfolding under different lights? Did the lights matter?

My cousin didn’t get to play but his team won. I rode home with my parents, like old times. And when we got home, they went to bed and I stayed up, like old times.

I went up to the room that was formerly mine.

I looked in the box that Dad had put on the bed. On top of everything else was a journal I had kept as a teenager. I flipped through it, but it was... awkward. The words were familiar, but it didn’t feel like anything I had written. It was like reading a book I had already read. And it felt invasive. Like I was intruding on someone else’s thoughts.

There were some other things in there. An old CD, but I didn’t have anything to play it on. My high school diploma. Have I ever actually needed that? No one has ever asked to see it. A photo of me in a group with some friends. I recognized all the faces, but where were they all now? I didn’t know. I wasn’t even connected with most of them on social media.

At the bottom of the box was an old game console. I plugged it into the TV and flipped the switch. Nothing happened. I sighed, and then tried again. This time, the light turned on and the console played its startup sounds. The game I had in it booted up. It hit me like a wave of the familiar knocking me over.

An old save file was still there. I loaded it, played through a little, and the world that had been created within that game was still just the same as it always had been. No progress, no change. I might not ever have known that time passed at all, judging by the fantasy world of this game.

But just like my old journal, it felt invasive. This wasn’t my save. This save belonged to some kid who had started it years ago.

Let the static be static.

After this, I opened the window. I used to sneak in and out of this window. But of course there was no need to do that now. Instead, I sat on the roof of the garage, looking at the stars. Those were still the same.

It’s like time is moving on without me. Like the authors of those ancient books in the library, the world moved past me. But would anything of me be left behind, other than a save file on some old game?

I just keep expecting time to stop, and it doesn’t.

What was left of the old place I once knew? Everything was the same on the map. The names and locations were the same, but it simply wasn’t the same world anymore.

And if my world doesn’t exist anymore, then who the hell am I?