You can never really go home.
Fuck.
The whole point of Falling Down
After both parents died, we four kids sold the house. It’s still “home”, but it’s not ours anymore. That home exists only in our memories, as do our parents. At 60, I’m the youngest of the four of us, so they’ll all be dying sooner than later. I take better care of myself than any of them, so I’ll probably be the last to go. Then it will only be my son left. He’s adamant that he doesn’t want kids, and I fully understand. Our family name will die with him.
That’s life.
I’ve kind of been on both sides of this.
For me, returning to and then leaving my home town triggers feelings of melancholy but also relief. I didn’t grow up in a stable, solidly middle-class (or higher) lifestyle, so I’m sure that’s a factor.
While I had a good childhood and loving parents, things got complicated the older I became. And even when I happen upon a reminder of the good times or a fond memory, way too often it’s tainted by how fucked up things were at the time.
On the other hand, “the kids” … it’s wonderful when they’re home for summer. When they’re at my house, at least I know they are safe, happy, and that all their needs are being met, in as much as possible. It’s sad to see them go, when I know it’s going to be months before they’re back.
But also, it’s a sigh of relief when my life can go back to being on my terms sans drama and chaos. It’s almost total bliss when I can go out to the kitchen in my undies for a cup of coffee fully confident that the milk jug won’t be sitting in the fridge completely empty (or with a minuscule amount of milk remaining so as to be practically useless but also technically not empty).
We brought the past with us. We’re still here and we’re advancing our historical works into the future.
So much of what was old is new again. So much of what was new is now a bedrock upon which the next thing is built.
Do a bit of digging and you’ll find it. Do a bit of listening and you can still hear history echo.
Expected this to take a dark turn because anon, was not prepared for warm poetic nostalgia in its place.
Fake: Anon has an idyllic homelife
Gay: Anon is emotionally well-adjusted
Fellas, is it gay to be emotionally well-adjusted?
I’m still young at 25, but I can see the hallmarks of aging. I’ve moved to a new state for 5 years now and when I visited my old home it felt half foreign, half familiar. I’m the youngest so my mom’s age is starting to show.
Things I consider recent are now described as “years ago”. I’m seeing things evolve through life. Things that felt like they had a beginning, middle, end now are starting up again. Almost like a ride that’s resetting for the next ones in line.
The biggest sign of aging for me is when you make a reference to a TV show and the person you share it with goes, “ah that was before my time.” Then, you realize it wasn’t released a few years ago… But more like a decade or two ago.
The biggest hit was someone who asked me about 9/11 because they weren’t alive at the time.
The other day I was talking in a common interest discord and mentioned that I largely moved from console to PC games in the late 90s. To which I was met with a “jfc how old are you?”
What sticks out to me, in hindsight, is how much of the development that happened in my early childhood. I remember the large empty track of land next to the highway that was turned into the local mega-mall. I remember the highway itself transforming from a simple flat two-lanes-each-way stretch all the way into downtown. Now its a six-lane overpass that’s getting another expansion. I remember the old community swimming pool that’s been expanded into a sprawling Aquatic Center. And how the half dozen different church denominations have been consolidated into one big Catholic compound. We have this enormous City Center that was just an abandoned parking lot when my parents moved in.
I also remember how the neighborhood had been comically, painfully white. Way back in the 90s, the town was effectively built on White Flight from the inner city, so it was mostly business and engineer families who’d abandoned downtown. We had a few big immigrant communities, primarily East Asian in character. But Latinos and Black families were kept beyond the county line by a combination of notoriously racist policing and white nationalist affiliated developers and real estate agencies. But all of that lapsed over the subsequent decades - now we have a much more mixed and more minority-affluent population. Hell, we have an East Asian County Judge, which is something that the elderly white now-minority had been fighting tooth and nail for decades.
I have no idea whether I’d say the area is better or worse. Racism hasn’t really gone away, it’s just much more of an Iranian Expats hating on Indian Expats thing that I’m not involved in. The fact that there’s still a ton of money being pumped through the city doesn’t hurt. But we still have a lot of greed and corruption and clichishness. There’s definitely a noticeable divide between the older and newer parts of the town. And we even have some apartments now, instead of just single-family homes as far as the eye can see.
Time moves on, I guess.
Kind of reminds me of this beautiful poem:
"…And I will leave. but the birds will stay, singing:
and my garden will stay, with its green tree,
and its white water well…
Many afternoons the skies will be calm and blue,
and the bells in the belfry will chime,
like they’re chiming this very afternoon.
The people who have loved me will die,
and the town will burst anew every year.
And in the corner of my green, flowering whitewashed garden,
my spirit will wander nostalgic from tree to well.
And I will leave,
and I’ll be lonely, without a home,
without a green tree, without a white water well,
without calm and blue skies…
And the birds will stay, singing."
-“El viaje definitivo”, Juan Ramón Jiménez
There’s a pretty good chance the house I grew up in will be bulldozed to build a condo complex. The 100+ year-old oak tree might survive, but more than likely it’ll be cut down, as will the maples and the plum tree.
The birds will move on.
Yeah, I noticed in my late 20s that the world has changed from my childhood. All my childhood sports heroes have retired. New music genres have replaced what I heard on the radio. A lot of my old haunts are still there, but some have been knocked down and replaced. It’s an… unsettling feeling when you realize the ground is moving beneath your feet. The best thing you can do is to keep moving yourself (figuratively, not literally). Explore new places, make new hobbies. Fill up your time with new experiences and you won’t have as much of a sense of loss.
But all the new stuff is enshittified by capitalism so it’s not as enjoyable as the old stuff.
The best is when you are lying in bed at night and some odd mix of neurotransmitters unlocks a memory you haven’t thought of in years, and then you spend an hour crying about the gulf of time between then and now, for what/who you’ve lost, and managing the crushing guilt that follows when you feel awful about not tending to the garden of your memories better.
Aging brings along the realization of how many things only exist in your memory, and even if they are recorded or memorialized no one will ever experience them the way you did.
That restaurant with your parents, That Mall, staying with distant family in some house that was sold 30 years ago or outright bulldozed. Those places are only special to you, and when you cease to exist, they won’t be special in the same exact way to anyone else. It’s the stupid childhood memories that honestly don’t mean anything on their own that feel the worst IMO
Almost 40 here, I feel the same. Some things evolve, some things get replaced and some mostly stay the same, but the worst is when it feels stagnant or even decaying. That’s worse than actual loss in some ways.
>be me
>have been avoiding my parents’ house for over a decade
Must be nice to have had a childhood that evokes that vibe.
Is it 30,000 pounds of bananas? I bet it’s 30,000 pounds of bananas.
I ate 30,000 pounds of bananas during a road trip once. I was on my way to see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.
Damn onion ninjas
They must be here too…
