We Can Return to a Place, but Not to a Time

If one day I return home after so many years abroad, will I be the same person returning to the same place, among the same familiar faces, along the same roads, under the same trees? I already know the answer. That never happens. Time does not keep a place unchanged simply because we remember it that way. I will never again see my father, who died while I was here. I also know that the blackberry tree so deeply tied to my childhood is no longer there. Time has withered it away. A familiar road may look different. A house may feel quieter. A face I expect to see may be missing. And even someone who is still there may no longer feel entirely familiar. I may meet an old friend whose face I know immediately, yet whose beliefs, values or way of seeing the world have changed so much that, for a moment, I may feel I am meeting a stranger inside a familiar face.

Before coming here, I spent years teaching in Bangladesh, and I know that even if I return to the institution where I taught, I will not find the same students, the same colleagues or the same everyday life I once knew there. The building may remain, but the world I remember inside it may already be gone. And perhaps that is the strange thing about memory. The world keeps changing while memory quietly holds another version of it inside us. We may walk again along an old road, but we cannot become the person who once walked there.

So what does it really mean to come home? Is homecoming simply returning to a place we once knew, or is it meeting that place again after time has changed both it and us? We sometimes wish we could recover an earlier time simply because a road, a house or a familiar corner still exists. But the past does not wait there for us. What waits is the present, carrying traces of what once was. We return with memories of people, places and versions of ourselves that may no longer exist anywhere except within us. Perhaps that is why homecoming can bring joy and sadness at the same time. We are happy to return, yet every familiar thing can remind us of something that cannot return with us. Homecoming, then, may not be a return to what was. It is a meeting between memory and change, between the person who left and the person who has finally come back.

I think about this even when I walk through Minard Hall. I still remember my first days there. The building was unfamiliar to me, but the English Department inside it felt even more like a maze. For the first couple of months, simply entering the department and finding the office or room I was looking for sometimes felt almost impossible. I can hardly remember a single day when I found my own office or a professor’s office on the first attempt. The hallways seemed to turn in unexpected directions; doors opened into places I did not yet know, and I often had to stop, turn back and figure out where I was going. I did not know the rooms, the offices or the faces. I was new to NDSU and still adjusting to Fargo, with its wind, snow and long winter. Around that time, someone told me that Minard Hall was haunted. He even searched online and showed me stories to prove his claim. I do not remember how seriously I took him, but the story certainly did not make this strange building feel any less strange.

Today, I smile when I remember it. Minard Hall is deeply familiar to me now, and the English Department no longer feels like a maze. I know which hallway takes me where. I know the classrooms and offices. More importantly, I know the people behind those doors. My professors are there. My friends and colleagues are there. I have studied there, taught there, worried there, laughed there and prepared for some of the most important moments of my graduate life there. I sometimes remain in Minard late into the night, when the hallways are almost empty, without giving its supposed ghosts a thought. Somewhere along the way, without my noticing exactly when it happened, the strange building and the confusing department inside it became familiar. Who knew that one day this supposedly haunted place would become haunting to me for an entirely different reason? Perhaps that is one way a place becomes home: not through a declaration, but through repetition, memory and the people whose faces we expect to see when we turn a corner.

But one day I will leave Minard Hall too. What if I return twenty or thirty years later? Perhaps the building will still be standing. Perhaps it will look almost exactly as I remember it. Or perhaps it will not be there at all. Even if the building remains, many of the people who make it familiar to me now may be gone. My friends will have moved elsewhere. My professors may have retired. Other students will occupy the classrooms. I may walk along a hallway filled with unfamiliar faces while remembering people whose names mean nothing to anyone there anymore. Would that still be a homecoming?

This question makes me think of perhaps the most famous homecoming in literature: Odysseus returning to Ithaca in "The Odyssey." He spends years away at war and years more trying to get home. Home is what he longs for. Yet when he finally reaches Ithaca, a difficult question remains: is the man who returns the same man who left? He has seen death, violence and suffering. He has lost companions. He has suffered, and he has caused suffering. Meanwhile, life in Ithaca has continued without him. His wife has waited. His son has grown. His household has changed. Odysseus reaches the same island, but he cannot return to the same moment. So what is his homecoming really? A return to a place, or an encounter between the person he remembers being and the person he has become?

Of course, the homecoming of a soldier from war and the return of a student to a university belong to very different worlds. Still, both remind us of one difficult truth: we can return to a place, but we cannot return to time. Perhaps that is what makes homecoming meaningful. We come back to places that once held our everyday lives and discover that the people have changed, the rooms have changed and we have changed too. A building may still stand exactly where we remember it, yet the life we once knew there may survive only in memory. The classroom remains, but not the conversation. The hallway remains, but not the familiar faces we once expected to see. The office door may still be there even after the professor, whose presence gave it meaning, has left. In this sense, homecoming becomes an encounter not only with what remains, but also with what is missing. Familiar places can therefore feel strangely unfamiliar. Perhaps alumni do not return only to see the campus again. They may also return to meet parts of themselves that still seem to live there.

A returning student may walk through the same building while remembering another version of that place, one filled with old anxieties, friendships, small victories, disappointments and conversations that no one else can see. The campus belongs to the present, but memory creates another campus beside it. No map can show that one. It exists only for the person who returns. Perhaps this is the quiet power of homecoming. It does not restore the past because it cannot. Instead, it places the past beside the present long enough for us to see the distance between who we were and who we have become. It also reminds us that belonging does not always end when we leave. A place can continue inside us long after we are gone, and we may leave something of ourselves there too through relationships, work, stories and memory. Homecoming, then, may not be about recovering what was lost. It may be about recognizing what has changed, what still remains and why a place continues to matter even after we no longer live there.