where i no longer belong

Today I passed by the area where my old college is situated , it was an unplanned visit and so where the emotions and feelings that washed over me as i stood there in the streets so dear to me , It felt as though the wind itself carried a taste of nostalgia, mixed with the scent of familiarity. I was overcome by a very strong, overwhelming feeling a hint of joy and sadness all at once , that quickly froze me in place. If you asked me how it felt, I would say it was deeply bittersweet.

The place held memories that can never be relived, revived, or forgotten. Every street, every shop, every quiet corner, every tree, and even the dust along the road seemed to whisper fragments of a past that pulled me backward  back to lecture halls, hurried footsteps, unfinished conversations, and laughter that only I can hear. Not vividly, but like blurred memories that made me feel strangely out of place. Ironically, I was taken back in time to the very place where I was standing  present in body, but lingering in a past version of it.

The streets still lay welcoming and constant, just as they used to be. Some shops looked the same as before, while others had undergone makeovers, replaced by new faces standing in and around the shops probably creating new memories of their own. The mountains watched from their silent distance. The college building remained steady and familiar, holding its ground as though nothing had shifted.

But the people .... the people who played the most important part in making this place special, flooding it with memories  were gone.

The faces that once filled those streets, those shops, those classrooms between the mountains, now exist only in memory. The laughter that once echoed there has thinned into silence. What once felt alive now feels preserved  untouched, yet emptied.

The place I once called my second home no longer recognized me. Or perhaps it was I who no longer belonged to it.

It remains a space I can visit, but never inhabit again.
Home, I realized, is not the place itself, but the version of ourselves that once lived there.