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Due to visa complications I haven’t been home to see my family since I moved continents five years ago. I had no idea when I left that I would never see my dog or the only home that I had ever known ever again.
I’m extremely concerned that I’m also pining for a place that doesn’t exist any more.
There’s a concept that we studied in literature in University about never truly being able to go home again after you grow up. We were reading an Alice Munro short story collection but Tom Wolfe famously wrote about the topic.
While the article's author seems to mostly complain about changes, I personally experienced the opposite. After years the town had barely changed at all, which felt very strange and worse the people that stuck around, but aged, had become what I perceived as distorted shadows of what I remembered with very little personal growth apparent.
In my 40s I went back to my home town, not having lived there since I was 18 (none of my family still lived there). First shop I went into the woman said, "Hi MrsDoyle, how's your mum?" In the bank, the teller clocked my name and said, "Aww, I used to babysit you!" I got a big hit of the claustrophobia that drove me away in the first place.
Well, thinking about “you can’t go home again”, it can be because the home you knew no longer exists
Or the you that was no longer exists
There's an expression that no person ever steps into the same river twice: because it's not the same river, and they're not the same person.
Here's the Wikipedia article for the (aptly titled) Wolfe book.
You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.
It might get better later on, once you accept that the world has moved on, your old room is now an office, your parents are becoming old people, and time is passing. At some point you start getting nostalgic about the things that remained the same in a different way - or at least I did. But Wolfe is still right - it's not home any more.
