There's No Time Like Home

Exploring the relationship between temporal and geographical distance

I love my hometown, but I also love not living in my hometown, because it means I get to return to my hometown.

I’m 34-years-old. This means that I was in the throes of high school half of my life ago. Most people who have lived as much (or more) life after high school as they did before high school likely feel as though their teenage years were a different lifetime.

I feel this. It is hard for me to believe that I actually lived the teenage memories that fill my head like miniature movies. They feel more like documentaries of someone else’s teenage life, not my own.

People like me who live far from home likely feel this separation in stronger ways than those who pass by their former employers and ex-girlfriends’ homes on their way to picking children up from school or going to the gym.

The physical separation I experience from my hometown amplifies the temporal separation I feel from the person I was when I lived there.

Maybe you understand this feeling.

Recently on our seven-plus-hour drive back to Middle Tennessee from Fort Wayne, Indiana over the Thanksgiving holiday, I reflected with my wife about what it feels like for me to go home. Place matters to me (a lot), and I’ve written about it before. It matters to me for many reasons: some of them nostalgic, some of them not. But I said some version of the following to Susie as we traveled back to our current home:

Going to Fort Wayne always just feels like a warm blanket to me. Not because of friends or family or anything like that (no offense to them). But because it is somehow deeply comforting to pass by familiar places that have changed little since we left and think that, in these neighborhoods, at these schools, and in these places, there are people living similar lives and having similar experiences that I had half of my life ago.

I don’t feel warm feelings about this because I want to go back to my life as a teenager. I don’t want that; I like my life now much more than my life as a teenager (which was generally good by the way!).

But amidst all the change I have experienced since driving the streets of my hometown in high school, there is a strange comfort in knowing the stage still stands, largely unchanged, and the show goes on. Young people on those streets write their own stories in a different time and at a different pace, but with many of the same raw materials I did half a lifetime ago.

Part of the reason such a realization is so comforting to me is because it is an affirmation of what I told myself often in as a teenager—life will go on after you leave this place.

When you experience an embarrassing social interaction on the way from one class to another in high school, or when you drop a tray of food on someone at your food service job that you work in the evenings, it’s so easy to believe that life cannot possibly go on from that moment. But it does. And if you’re fortunate, you’ll get to leave, come back, and see that no one remembers any of that but you.

The reality that physical distance undergirds temporal distance is supported by the feeling I get whenever we cross the bridge from Louisville into southern Indiana on our way to Fort Wayne. The sensation you get slowly traveling back in time on a seven-hour drive home cannot be replicated by a short plane ride, however more convenient the latter may be. We travel years into the past in a span of a day at the speed of 70 miles-per-hour. It is a certain kind of time travel that’s usually reserved for science fiction.

While I have now lived as much life after high school as I did leading up to high school, Susie and I are rapidly approaching a similar tipping point—the point at which we will have made our home in Middle Tennessee for as long as we made it in Northeast Indiana. And yet, calling “Fort Wayne” by its proper name rather than “home” feels as clunky as calling a teacher or a parent by a first name. It never feels right no matter how old you get.

There is no place, or time, like home…even once it’s not really home any longer.