If you've ever moved cities in your life, you know the terrible push and pull feeling you get in your stomach when you think about how much you miss your "old life" while still loving your "new life". It's like gravity has decided to go in multiple directions, and your body and brain become exhausted from trying to keep up. I've had this feeling for about nine years. I moved from Ferguson, Missouri, to a smaller, almost rural town almost an hour away when I was eleven years old. My first year there was pretty rough, but once we became closer with our neighbors and I made a small group of friends, things became easier. I took down some walls I had built and got back into my old hobbies of soccer and softball. I tried Girl Scouts again too, but neither troop that was available would take me in (technically, they can't do that, but I figured if they weren't nice enough to let me in, they weren't worth associating myself with anyway). Even after a decade of living there, I still have moments of homesickness for my life in Ferguson - not just the being a kid again part but simple things like the ease of being able to run ten minutes or so down the road to Target, instead of having to trek thirty minutes up the highway like we have to now.
With the newest wave of freshman at SEMO this year came many kids (now adults) I was friends with back in Ferguson, and I'm happy to say I even reconnected with some of them. But time has not been kind to our hometown and our old stomping grounds around the greater St. Louis area.
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My best friend still lives in Ferguson, still just one door up from my old home. When we left, we left behind new shag carpeting in the living room, a new vanity in the second bathroom, a beautifully landscaped front yard, and coffered front doors painted a rich navy. My friend has reported that the shag carpeting was thrown out not even a year after we moved out, the new vanity with it beside the trash. The front doors are now flat and white and the flowerbeds remain empty.
My dad and I drove back there the winter of my senior year to do our annual Christmas Eve cemetery visits (the only time we ever go visit my grandparents' graves), and I asked him to bring his camera so we could re-create a picture from my first day of kindergarten. We took the pictures, but I never posted them because of the huge "No firearms, no drugs" sign outside the door of an elementary school.
When I was seven, a new mall opened in a neighboring town. Then, it was called the St. Louis Mills Mall. It was mainly an outlet mall, and was home to a lot of stores geared towards families and kids. It was more than just a mall - it boasted a bar, an ice arena (where the Blues did/still practice), a theme park of sorts called Nascar Speedpark, a skateboard park, a carousel in the middle of the food court, glow in the dark mini-golf, a giant play area, and eventually a huge Cabela's was added on. I attended countless birthday parties at both the speedpark and the ice rink, even after I moved away from Ferguson. I attended many Girl Scout events there; the last event we went to as a troop was there at a scrapbooking store.
But then I went back this summer. I knew it was run-down. I knew it had been slowly emptying over the years. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I saw, which can pretty much be summed up in this video and this Facebook post (the FB post leaves out what is still open at the mall).
When I moved away, I guess there was a part of me that thought time in Ferguson would simply freeze, that no one there would move on with their lives without me in it. Obviously, that isn't the case, but it doesn't stop that pit feeling from forming in my stomach when I look back at my old classmates and realize how different and far apart we have ended up.
So for those of you that have moved but can still look back and see a near mirror image of what you left behind - hold on tight to it. And for those of you who look back and might as well be seeing your hometown falling off of the face of the earth, just realize how much more important your memories now are. Life can steal a lot of things, but memories usually aren't one of them.
