Every winter, I go back to visit the house I grew up in. I stand in my old bedroom and try to remember what it felt like to be a younger me living here, instead of being a visitor to the memory of what “here” even is. Here, all my stuff has stayed exactly the same as I remember from that time. It is frozen—a memorial, in a way, to some past version of me who is gone now, who I no longer am. And it doesn’t feel like home anymore. Standing in my old bedroom feels uncanny, just a little bit like standing in the apartment below mine. Only instead of having stepped into a hallway on the wrong
...more
