The sky is dark today; it's heavy, like your mood. It looms low over the landscape which flickers past like a film reel - each telegraph pole punctuating each new frame - as you watch your journey along the M4 play out before you like a movie you can't rewind.
It has a gravity to it. Home. You felt so sure that it was just a sentimental notion, home is where the heart is or some bollocks, but you can feel it now, the weight of it. It's drawing you back.
The closer you get, the more the tightness in your chest dissipates, and you think, bitterly, that it feels more like resignation than relief. You look around at the sad figures that surround you, sandwiched tightly together on this bus that's going nowhere. You'd feel sorry for them, but they're doing better than you, you think as the view out the grimy window slowly morphs into something you're beginning to recognise.
You might as well be going backwards.
...
You go away and expect everything to have changed, but on the surface, it all looks the same. It's the scale of the city that has shifted. You feel like a stranger in a strange land, and wonder, vaguely, if it's not you that is irreversibly altered. It makes you think back to the day you found a dusty box of your childhood belongings (the ones that Katie hadn't managed to destroy or claim), and remember how they were at once so familiar and so foreign. You remember how the toys seemed like miniatures; they felt so tiny in your hands, so fragile, where they had once seemed quite massive. Returning feels the same way, and it reminds you, once again that you are different than you once were.
Even so, you remember things as they were three years ago, and stupidly get off at the bus stop near your old house on Dibstall Road and curse yourself for forgetting, muttering all the way as you trudge your heavy pack to the other side of town.
You see familiar faces in the passersby, and realise only on the second glance that they are not the faces you thought they were. It jars you to remember that so many of the people you knew back then have moved away or are just plain gone. You even think you see her once or twice, think you catch glimpses out of the corner of your eye, but as far as you know, she doesn't live here anymore and wouldn't want to see you anyway. She has probably moved on and wouldn't care to be found, and you're not even sure you have the energy to try.