Returning To Yesterday's Place

I'm seeing my hometown for the first time since I moved to Denver. I grew up in a small mountain town. When I arrived, the aura of this place felt... missing. Whatever magic this place had seemed hollow. Even if I wanted to go back to my broken past, I don't belong there anymore. I love my new friend group, and college has been extremely fun and unpredictable. However, I feel the remnants of my old life clinging to a crumbling castle. Slowly, the cracked remnants of the castle walls have begun drifting away in a vast black sea. Each of them, a friend from a life that seems like it ended so long ago.

The depths of my remembrance began to surface. Even still, this is not the same place I remember growing up in. It can only be described as an enveloping silence, infecting the entire town with an empty feeling. It was like the town, as impossible as it was, lost its character. I, and everyone else in my graduating class, were the pulsing hearts of a place now existing without. Each moment, a plethora of corrupted memories fluttered around me like swarms of invisible, lifeless butterflies. It felt like a structurally stable house with a missing foundation. The negated sunlight and crescent shadows of a solar eclipse. What kind of homesickness is this? Should the place I come from feel so completely incomplete?

Within the hazy storm of my old childhood home, I lay in deep thought. Little flickers of motion and bits of sound would come back from the past to haunt me like TV static buried deep within my subconscious. A buzzing electrical box behind the television created an unbearable, sickening tone throughout the residence. The incessant ring reminded me of bitter, disdained white noise. The echoes of my father's broken painting became overrun with every type of dissonant insect one could imagine. A dream slowly being plagued, rotted, and consumed by the nightmares of my absence. With how little oxygen exists there, it almost felt like traversing on a foreign planet. Maybe that's why my father accuses me of alienation.