Same old town. Nothing has changed.
There used to be a 7-11 on the corner there, but now it's a Kwik-Shop. You can still get gas or an Icee, but these days they have vape supplies and phone cards, too. The old hospital is still there, but it's all administrative offices now. Everybody goes to one of the outlying buildings for tests or treatment. The bowling alley shut down ten months ago. Stormwater leaked in, and the lanes warped. Nobody wants to pay to fix it. Milt's cafe, out near the edge of town, closed when Milt died. It's a daycare now.
Nothing has changed.
The Tuesday night cruise, where seemingly every kid in the county polished up their car and cruised the strip between the Walmart parking lot and the Sonic, doesn't happen anymore. Gas costs too much. Over the summer, the high school had to be renovated. The firewalls the district paid to have built into the plenum thirty-five years ago were never actually installed, and they couldn't start a new school year without them. Hawthorn Hill, the cemetery that overlooks the town, has spilled out of its original wrought iron fencing, and it's now surrounded by chain-link. I knew a lot of the names on those stones.
If you returned for the first time in twenty-five, thirty years, you wouldn't know the town. But nothing has changed.
I left when I was twenty, and I stayed gone. I'll be fifty next year, and I'm back for the first time. I'm a stranger again. I don't recognize the faces. I don't know the names people bandy around: the mayor, who's promising to renew the downtown area that was already falling into disrepair by the time I left; the high school running back who's going places after graduation, if only he can get a good scout; the county deputy who crashed his patrol car while speeding to the scene of a different car crash. It's like they hit pause.
I sit here at Sonic on a Tuesday evening. Three other cars are pulled up, but most of the stalls are empty. Memories are like whispers from ghosts. It was in this slot (or maybe the next slot over) where Tammy Burchette told me that tater tots make you fat, and Bobby Coltrane piped up from the back seat, "Not if they have jalapenos." Back then, cars endlessly circled the joint looking for a place to park. Now, I slurp my Twisted Flamingo alone.
A carhop, some high school girl with a pixie cut and the shadow of concealed acne on her chin, brings a tray of food I didn't order.
"Totchos with jalepenos?" she asks.

I wave her away and take that as my sign to gather up my things and leave. As I get back into my car, cup too big to shove into the holder, I toss it out the window at the trash can next to me. It misses, spilling icy guts onto the sidewalk. A teenager in a pink denim jacket glares at me.

I roll the window back up and pull out, driving past the buildings with their unchanged shells. My car hits a pothole as I turn left. Nothing’s changed.

As I get on the road home, I can’t help but look at the houses encroaching upon my street. Mrs Baker is gone now, a family must live there, two kids, because theres toys strewn in the yard, and a preteen sized bike out front. Bobby’s gone too, his car’s been replaced by a soccer mom’s minivan. I round the corner, then, and I see it:

Number 107.

I haven’t been inside for thirty years. But my parents are dead and everything is worse now.

In a split second, I remember that the door number was a white taping on the wooden door, but has now been replaced with a bronze plate and...more to that, the old door of wood had gone and, in its place, a dark, sleek steel door stood congruently between the grey concrete wall. I sat in my car, pangs of hunger still shouting at my inner ears for some sweet and sour touch. I rub that thought off and drive round to the next street, curious to establish what became of a retired home-owner who was so obsessed with gardening. My heart lights up to figure out even a better trim of his front hedge and an assortment of different breeds of plants decorated in all sorts of colours from their flowers jutting through the fine trimming heavenwards.

The DON’T PARK HERE road signage that dominated the front of his drive since I was born is gone and his gardening-loyal Volkswagen Combi van is gone too, if not just on a days errands. But it only used to leave the driveway on Saturdays. It's only a Tuesday. I pulled up right there -where the sign used to be, and blinked a hundred times,firstly to reset my eye focus to see what really hadn’t changed and secondly, to provoke the owner. Inviting attention. I wanted a familiar face to talk to. No one moves. I scan the front window that serves the yellow-painted internal walls of the living room but I can’t see any heads against the window, the light outside is more than the light inside and the window blinds are white so that won't help. I look for other clues that would inform me that it’s still the resident and the father of these plants. I find no clues because no one moves even after I step out the car to shoot pictures of the Garden of Aden, again, to provoke attention. No one speaks to me except a woman in the opposite flat.

“Hi, are you a visitor?”

I commanded my lips to mumble something, anything, that was closer to the truth, “Hi, …yeah.... No.”

When I raised my head to see if she has another task to do other than prying on me, all I see is a far, much reduced skeletal frame retreating into the house barefooted and my hopes of having a little chitchat about what’s changed here is dwindled. I walk up towards a convenience shop because my whole system is raging over a dieting moment that they didn't sign up for. A few paces and I remember I was driving so I returned to my automobile to, more crucially, unblock someone’s driveway, still feeling so lost in a place that I’m damn convinced nothing has changed but, definitely a place that a lot is going on than it used to.