I drive slowly past the house, hoping no one is outside. If someone were in the yard, I’d feel compelled to stop, explain myself, and ask if I could come inside and look around.

It looks so different now, I hardly recognize it. Once a bright yellow with black shutters, it’s now a pale blue, with crisp white shutters and a newly attached garage.

Strangers’ home now. But not just any strangers. Strangers who have made a life here, where I once lived mine. I wonder what their story is, and what memories they are building within those walls.

Do they have children? Do the children wander through the woods behind the house and invent imaginary friends like I used to? Mine was Pepsi the Bear, who lived in a cave and told me secrets no one else could hear. 

I try to picture the inside of the house now. I imagine the once-dated browns, yellows, oranges, and avocado greens of the 1970s replaced by sleek stainless steel appliances and walls painted evergreen beige or soft white. 

Despite the flood of memories, I cannot recall what my childhood bedroom looked like.  I remember how it felt to lie in bed and listen to the wind against the windows, how safe and small the world seemed from beneath my blankets. But the colours, the furniture, have all slipped away from my memory.

I keep driving around the neighbourhood, past the houses that once belonged to my childhood friends. They are different now, too. New siding, new roofs, unfamiliar cars in the driveways.

The people I knew are gone. I wonder where they all are, and what they became. I wonder if they ever circle back here like I do, from time to time.

I see the friend’s backyard where I fell off the swing set and broke my arm.  There’s the street where I flipped over my bike and got a concussion, the sound of metal on pavement, the blur of the sky spinning overhead. And the stretch of road that connects onto a busy highway,  where I once pedaled down on my tricycle, my poor mother chasing frantically after me.

Honestly, how did I make it out of here alive?

The neighbourhood feels smaller now, miniaturized by memory and time. As a child, it felt vast and limitless. But maybe that is how you are supposed to feel when you revisit the past. 

It is like looking in a rearview mirror. Objects behind you appear smaller and more distant than what lies ahead. Yet some part of you still wants to keep glancing back, just to ensure the road you traveled is still there.

I take one last look around before driving away. The house, the streets, the childhood I left behind. And even though I don’t stop, even though I don’t go inside, part of me has already walked through that door, wandered the rooms, and said a quiet goodbye.