We’ve been going down to our old neighborhood at least once a week for the last few weeks to check on a friend’s cats. Every time we drive down the streets we know like the back of our hands and see the places we shopped, ate, and hung out with friends, I feel this really pointed sadness in my heart and gut.

Three-plus years since we moved away … and I still miss the old ‘hood. I still miss the old ‘hood badly.

On Monday, as we were cruising down a stretch of highway past our old grocery store and favorite 7-11, I told Lin how sad it made me to see the old haunts and know we don’t live there anymore and aren’t a part of that place like we used to be. He summed it up thusly:

“Even if we moved back, it wouldn’t be the same. It already wasn’t the same when we decided to move.”

He’s right about that. It all looks the same, but it isn’t the same. Sure the same grocery store is there selling the same things, and the same gas stations are there, and the same bars are there, and the streets haven’t changed at all, but the people and the feeling of the place have all evaporated. Even if we moved back onto the same sleepy street we used to live on, I would still be homesick for the old neighborhood, because the “old neighborhood” is now just an illusion, a memory, a time that has passed … the glory days.

I think these trips across town are directly related to my low mood this month. But you can’t go back to something that isn’t there anymore, can you? It isn’t like our lives were really all that much better (or worse) down there, or that our lives across town are all that much worse (or better). Our lives are mostly the same except for a few small points, but they aren’t really that small at all. Not if it makes one sad.

We no longer have hundreds of friends we see on a weekly basis. In fact, we have almost no friends at all, at least not any we see regularly or in large groups. We don’t have a place we go every week to hang out, though the Buffet Palace was beginning to fill that role (and now it’s gone too). We don’t have any neighbors with which we “click” and about whom we care at all, which we did have at the apartment. All of the neighbors here could move out and be replaced by all new people, and I don’t know that we’d immediately notice. Even three years in, we are only now beginning to feel the slightest bit of “fitting in” but it’s come and go and very fleeting. We always felt like we “fit in” across town. It was home. This house and area still doesn’t feel like home. I still feel like a visitor when I am out and about among my fellow North Central Austinites. It feels sad and lonely.

But you can’t go back, can you? Because what you want to go back to isn’t really there anymore, even though the brick and mortar still stands, the people and mood of the places are gone. So there’s really no sense being upset or crying about it. We made a major life decision to buy a house and move, and from that have come some good things and some bad things, and that’s just life. Moving on mentally is a lot harder to do than moving on physically. That’s also life.

I’m sure when we aren’t seeing the old haunts on a weekly basis anymore, I will once again forget for a while how much I used to love where we lived and the life we were leading there. Right now though, I seem to be wallowing in a subtle form of despair, even though I know things weren’t ever going to be the same there had we stayed … except for us not owning a house and our landlord buying a new Cadillac every year while the apartment complex fell into disrepair.

Sigh…