I left my home country 25 years ago. Meanwhile I changed to 3 countries and 2 continents… when I left, my parents lived in a big house where I grew up, my grand parents were always around making drama or dinners, we had a few local markets and I knew the town by heart… my parents divorced. My father remarried and had 2 new kids, my childhood house got sold and torn down, the government invested billions in my hometown to the point that there are now highways connecting suburbs, international supermarkets, immigration issues and all the “modern” life… my grand parents died, there house are now part of tall buildings, I had uncles and aunts who also died, cousins who died, my primary and my middle schools got torn down and are new high buildings…

I talk to my sister and mother every week on visio phone… they even came to visit, but we have grown apart… we essentially talk about the past, but what I regret as the good times they think of it as obscure times… because they wanted to evolve while I did not what that. This hard and difficult paradox between what my memory tells me about what the place should be and what the place became is not bearable to me… so I decoded to stop thinking about my home town in term of a place. But more a place in time. While I can always go there geographically, I cannot go back in time… so I accept their calhange and accept that regardless I won’t be affected… so I try to be happy for them and learn as much as I can of the time that lapsed since my last visit