I left home for the first time when I was eighteen years old. I was quite excited about it. Not that I didn’t like my home, but I was never too fond of my hometown. It was small. It never felt like much of anything, and I can remember dreaming of the city, which I believed would be the place for me. There would be so much more happening there, after all. I reckoned I could use something different, something new—a fresh start, if you will, and when I was accepted to what was then Ryerson University, that dream came true. So, I left home, and off I went to Toronto.

I spent a month or so there before I came back home for the first time, and while I can remember feeling some sadness that this long chapter of my life—which I resented at the time—had come to a close, it was nice to be back for a change. I saw some of my old friends, and we went about life as I would have when I’d actually lived there. Except this time around, I recall feeling very out of place. I found myself somewhere quite familiar, yet I felt alien to it. My life now was different, but my old home remained more or less the same. I was, for lack of a better term, a stranger in my own hometown, like nothing had changed even though it had. I had new stories to tell, but they wouldn’t hear of it. It was as though I was supposed to pretend that nothing had happened.

I’ve found myself thinking about this more now that I have moved back to Toronto for a second time. So much has changed since the last time I lived here, but that fact goes completely unacknowledged by this apathetic city in which I find myself once again. Of course, cities themselves cannot know of such changes, but it is odd that one may look upon such familiar places and find them unrecognisable. Just earlier today, I ordered my old coffee order from a shop I frequented in my first year of undergrad, and as I drank it, I thought about how this was the first time that I, as I am now, have had one, even though I remember enjoying more than my fair share of them many years ago. Time carries on as it is, and so must we all. I’d be lying if I didn’t say it didn’t taste as sweet as I’d recalled. But I suppose that’s just what happens when you go there and back again.