Change Over Time

     I like my hometown. I really do, I swear. I'm just not overly attached to it. You would think I would be. No place else had ever been home until I went away to school, but no. For as long as I can remember I had sworn off being one of those people who comes back after college. I have no good reason except that I decided it once and it's just never really appealed to me to prolong my time here.  I've slept in the same twin-size been since I outgrew my crib, I've driven along the same roads from my car seat years until I was the one behind the wheel. I could draw you a map of where everything is in Wal-Mart and Hannaford, and let you know which Dunkin is the fastest en route from one end of town to the other. I used to know everything about this place like the back of my hand.
      Spending a year away has made evident just how quickly things can change. There's at least 5 new stores in the mall that I didn't know about. They're building a Taco Bell across from Wendy's and there's a weird elevated square in the middle of the Marshall's parking lot. The library, my library, doesn't use stamp cards anymore for return dates. They switched to receipts - receipts! I was raised on stamp cards. I used to look at the due dates that preceded mine and try to make up stories as to why the person 3 before me returned the book so fast it could be taken out two days later. Was it good? Was it terrible? Did they have to suddenly leave the country? Where did they flee to? What was their crime? It was a fun game. Anyway. Change doesn't bother me. Change is healthy.  It's a sign of life; pulsating progress that moves us to where we should be. I'm all for it. What does bother me is what I didn't realize until I came back: the fact that it can do so without me here.
        When we leave a place, we hold it in our minds as our fondest memories depict it. Our memories don't show us the life that remains here as ours continue elsewhere. We expect that when we return, things will be just as we left them. We don't imagine our most influential teachers have found new pupils to mold. We don't think about how our parents might have settled into a quiet routine that is blissfully free of our shoes in the middle of the kitchen and our dirty dishes in the sink. I never fathomed that the place I hold dearest, the place that has built a rough foundation for the person I have become, would substitute the thick, ink filled manilla slips that provide so much character with flimsy little paper receipts destined for the nearest recycling bin. I was raised here. It's the only world I have ever known. It's my world. My streets, my stores, my high school, my mall, my thruway exit, my neighborhood. All mine.
   
     It is equal parts hurtful and humbling to realize that the people and places so integral to my childhood can carry on so successfully in my absence. I am not this town's world, though it may once have been mine. I'm just another car, another girl, another heartbeat who contributes to the pulsating progress every time she drives away.