Life in a Small Town
Jun 05, 2026
Several of my friends from other places and other times have found themselves back in the towns where they grew up. Some were gone for decades and returned, pulled back by any number of ill-defined circumstances.
I am one of those, pulled back to a place I managed to escape in my teens. I’m thinking this return to small-town USA is temporary, a glitch in the matrix that will soon resolve and once again send me on my way.
But it’s ten years gone already.
This last decade has been a time of massive upheaval and reinvention, a case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. Then again, who goes ten years without change?
This isn’t a bad place, nestled in the mountains of the Great American Southwest, but it’s quite different from the massive mega-cities that consumed the last 40 years of my life. The little village of my childhood has become a proper small town. Many of the people and places of my youth are gone, but I have made new friends and discovered new places.
All of which got me thinking…
If you are blessed/cursed to return to the town where you grew up, there’s a strange transformation that takes place, especially if you’re on the far end of a family and a career. In a small town you’re forced to look at the places that you visited hundreds of times—because there isn’t much else—and you can’t help but recall things from back in the day.
Some of the memories are not good, but a lot of them are. Small things that you didn’t think much about at the time are somehow very important to you now. The meal that you shared with somebody special in the little mom-and-pop restaurant, the local store where you had your first job, the place where you had your first kiss. Memories of parents and friends and good times you created by yourself.
When you first get back to that little town, all of that will come up. The ghosts of people lost to the attrition of time, events long gone that still resonate in your mind, for better or worse. You will likely attempt to resurrect some of the good old days; to look up old friends or old lovers. To revisit old haunts, if they’re still there, to strike up new relationships in the hope that they will make you feel the way that some of your old relationships did.
But the town is not the same, and the people are not the same. You are not the same.
The buildings have new stores in them now. Some of the buildings are completely gone, your ability to revisit them bulldozed along with their foundations and walls. Many of the people have died, some of whom were critical parts of who you are today, even though they’re not here today.
The ones who have survived may have changed dramatically as life has tossed them about in various ways. Smiling faces have become cynical. Attractive bodies have grown ripe with too much stress and too much food and too much indulgence. If you have done poorly in your life, those who have done well typically don’t want to have anything to do with you. If you have done well in your life, those who have done poorly typically don’t want to have anything to do with you.
This is all part of the loneliness we inherit as we get older. Just as anxiety is the price of consciousness, so loneliness is the price of an extended stay on the planet.
Once you have tried to relive the memories of the good old days and revisit the locations where those memories were made, there comes a realization: all of that is gone.
The buildings and locations and people that remain are not the same as they were in your memories. Whether that’s because your memories have changed or the people and places have changed is irrelevant.
When all of that sinks in, when you finally come to accept it, you realize that the people and places, the memories good and bad were all just a function of that particular intersection of time and space. They were here as a part of your experience, and they will never be here again.
We are all just passing through a series of time-space conjunctions that manifest to us as people, places and things.
Humans have an astounding capacity to forget about pain. I suspect this may be a biological mechanism encoded into us deeply to make sure, for instance, that women have more than one child.
When the troublesome memories have been put to rest and the fond memories remain just that, what is left?
The same things that were always there: gratitude for the people and events that caused you to grow and become who you are. And the adventure of what lies ahead, based upon your thoughts and actions in the present.
Which is really all you had anyway.
Read my recent interview with Dr. Mehmet Yildiz here.
My novel, The Calling is available now in print and as an eBook.
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- JWW
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