When Home No Longer Feels Like Home

He had vivid memories of that place as a child, but he wasn’t certain the place remembered him with the same clarity or fondness. He had always known it as a place full of life, bustling with human presence, screams, and squealing into the night. One wouldn’t travel four meters and not feel the presence of another human. However, all that had changed.

It’s amazing what gentrification can do – how it exhibits the most vicious vampiric mannerisms, sucking the soul out of a place and leaving it hollow. The change was symbolized in clearly discernible structures: high-rising malls and hotels. For clarity, the hotel replaced the slums, the high-rising departmental store building replaced the market, and expensive apartments replaced the strip of bars where local brew was served. The change had been drastic, happening over a period of ten years or so.

Now, standing in the same place he stood in as a child, he realized that the familiarity was lost; it wasn’t a place he connected to anymore. He saw where a beaten path used to be – a route he used to take with his friends in the early hours of the night to places in the slums where they wrought harmless mischief. However, now there was a high-rising wall with a stretch of pampered grass leading to glass structures.

He saw a place where he sat with friends into the night to narrate movies they had watched, but that had also been gazetted because gentrification had come and taken something important from the town – the freedom to roam. Now, there were well-paved streets to follow and security guards at every turn, guarding the new establishment. Yet, while he was young in the same place, the dusty paths leading nowhere led them everywhere.

Oh, the market! He remembered that with a lot of fondness – the uphill path to the market where he first saw a shooting star with his first love, now overgrown with bushes and thicket behind a fence. He remembered running a lot without tiring or caring for the dangers of running in the dark because he was certain that if he found trouble, there would be someone he knew to help him.

Now, silence filled every space of the town. When he saw the newly paved roads, all he could think of was the gentrification they brought, and not the supposed development that was drummed. The town used to be a place of poverty and sometimes insecurity, but at least it had life. The poor had been squeezed out, one inch at a time, until it was hard to see anyone left.

Life had moved on, and everyone had moved on, but the nostalgia was strong when he saw the place that raised him. A part of him understood that it was only inevitable that the town changed over the years, but it saddened him how much it had changed in a short period that it became unrecognizable.

People had left, almost everyone. Where to, he couldn’t tell, and he probably would never know. But a strange paradox came to him when he climbed the hill to look down at the town that he knew – a strange truth was revealed to him, that it wasn’t only people that had left the town, it was that they had gone with the town because this wasn’t the same town. It might have the same coordinates on the map, but its soul had been enveloped by something else – something vicious, obnoxious, unbecoming, cold, unforgiving, unrelenting, unyielding, and potentially destructive.

What was a sense of nostalgia turned to a deep feeling of loss – the loss of his childhood. And when he left later that evening, he turned back to look at it one last time, knowing he wouldn’t return. Only one thought came to his mind: “I will always miss what this place was.”