The Return to Old Familiarity

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A return to the States is like a regression in time where buildings, roads, and store names have changed while people and old habits haven't. There's a new building on the corner, the highway is a little wider, a little longer before the familiar construction, and that one restaurant where you used to go has closed shop while three chain restaurants have opened in its stead. People have matured slightly with the passing of another year, but most of them look the same, act the same, and surely think the same as they did when you knew them in what seems like a previous life whose tracks you've picked back up.

The comparisons are inevitable in the first couple weeks due to the shift in perspective you've gained from living in, experiencing and learning about different cultures. You notice things you didn't notice before and you comment on trivial matters like pouring drinks and shaking hands as if they're novel inventions whose introductions to society you missed. Your eyes are wide, your mind is buzzing, and your excitement is unshakable. The world you were most familiar with has been reshaped into this novel creation you took for granted but now appreciate. It's hopeful.

Then time happens. Just like sharing food with everyone at your table while sitting cross-legged on a floor becomes natural, in the return to your old familiar you begin to slide into the routine of habits past. You lose your mental edge. Classified ads depress you, and the excitement of this new world quickly fades with the dust of days so that the novelty and memories of a dream life passed is no longer your previous life from the States, but your previous life in that foreign land. You start to wonder if you were ever actually there. You know you were, but it confuses you that it's over now. Did it really happen? Was I really living my life in that country, that way, performing all of those strangely beautiful new habits? Why have I returned to the habits I practiced before learning the beautiful ones? Is it over? Is that it?

There lives a ghost in your memory. It haunts your return to your previous life. It doesn't fit in with the memories conjured up by the familiarity surrounding you now. Should you bring it back to life? Should you shun it to the recesses, in order to make your daily activities less bizarre? How do you accept a ghost into your current reality?

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Comments

[MikeyMogo]

what of memories?
Yeah bro, I feel you entirely. It's unsettling. I'd have a shit-ton of regret, personally, had I not chosen to return. My time there is just not done. It's as if life here wipes away, forcefully, the time spent away. Not out of malice, just out of the sake of normalcy and constant-ness.