Back to My Childhood.... After 23 Years

This morning I boarded a bus from Prague to a small town in central Slovakia where I grew up... and where I haven't been for 23 years. I was quite curious (and anxious) how it would feel to see it again after such a long time.

To my surprise, the place looks a lot better than I remember (the 40 year old broken sidewalk notwithstanding).

But I don't want to talk about that. I want to talk about how the place is DIFFERENT...about how time changes and disintegrates everything.

Everything that made this place dear to me is gone (friends are gone, family is dead....etc.). I returned a stranger to a place that I once loved. I still love it. It is beautiful and even though it is different, there are many memories everywhere and also that familiar feeling that assails me every time I turn a street corner.

But the place of my childhood, the place of my earliest memories, does not exist. I am a completely different person... and even if some things have not changed, the meaning it has for me has.

I am feeling a gamut of emotions. I am amazed, delighted, sad, jaded, and incredulous all at the same time. And something is dissolving in me, a very early attachment... the sentimentality and the glow of childhood, the mythical land of my earliest memories that was always just that, a myth...

You cannot step into the same river twice.
Damn right.

I sat by the river where I spent my childhood in a haze for a long time... feeling sadness and delight at the same time.