Walking through Lancaster, Ohio, my old haunt, as it were, was an interesting experience. Imagine being able to walk through the city on autopilot, as you are so familiar with it, but feeling so odd in this familiar setting that you only wish to go home, back to where there is at least some familiarity entangled with the faces one expects to see.

I returned home to this sleepy little hamlet after school let out. I have three months to cool my heels and do what I wish. However, I wish to be with those friends which I met through high school. This has not and will not happen, as my class in high school has been strewn like seeds onto the winds, due to the event called graduation. Thus, the paths I used to tread, fraught with the glow of past experiences, have grown icy with unfamiliarity and a lack of ties to the current.

When I go out on these journeys, I feel like I am looking through three different filters. One is clear, the one in which I view the events that are current, one is rose-coloured, replaying the events that have shaped my life, and one is scratched, trying to superimpose the events of the year just past on the landscapes of the more distant past.

How do people deal with this feeling of disorientation? This feeling that I have just begun to feel has been felt by more elderly people for scores of years. Any place that they go that has been molded by time into something that is completely different. People have died, or otherwise have scattered even farther away then any graduation could do. The immense weight that I felt walking around town, a weight that left me when I was able to transcribe it, is felt by the elderly every second of every day. How utterly depressing.