You know, people asked me if I was going home, and I honestly didn’t know how to answer them. If I’m being honest with myself, this place is no longer home, but in place and at times it still feels like it. When I go down to South Street, even though it has changed so drastically since I lived here fifteen years ago, it still feels like home. Going past Geno’s, and all those hole-in-the-wall cafes, and all those people dressed up in the Gothic fashion late at night, now that still feels like home. Or driving down Arch street in West Philly and seeing the Studio 7 Lounge, a guy dressed in a yellow dress, or the G bus, yes indeed, that still feels like home.
But then again it also doesn’t feel like home, with everybody’s faces glued to their cellphones, without a Rita’s Water Ice stand on every corner, with no Tower Records, that doesn’t feel like home. Or the fact that I can now get lost going places I’ve been a million times. I come back to visit every now and then, but I’m very aware that it had been a full year between the last visit and this one, and my sense of direction knows it too. My body feels it, an aching in my bones for the home I used to know, a place that no longer exists, except in my mind. And even that is fading in places.
We all grow up. We all change, and we all move on with our lives. But we also all look back, to that spark of familiarity, to keep us grounded, to remind us of where we came from, of what started it all. Even when some of us don’t move away, the world we live in changes around us while we try to hold it down, but we can’t. Shift happens, and we either happen with it, or we get shoved aside by it. I was speaking with a friend last night about how things change, about old people and how we’ll all be there someday. How we’ll all become relics of a time we used to know, artifacts put in museums that the younger generations “ooh” and “aah” over because they don’t identify with us or with our previous ways of life anymore.
That’s why we all tend to get nostalgic from time to time, to live in a past that is at once familiar and comforting to us, because we are afraid of the future’s uncertainty, and we are just looking for home.
Sam
Sam's Online Journal 