The World You Grew Up In Is Gone

I don’t feel much like I have a home or specific place I grew up, but if I had to pick it would probably be Kensington, MD. It's a small incorporated suburb smashed between the larger cities of Bethesda, Wheaton, and Silver Spring. I spent time all over the DMV over the years, but there’s nowhere else I spent as much time.

I moved there with my parents and younger brother when I was 12. We stayed in that house until I was 16, the year I graduated high school shortly after my parents suddenly divorced. I lived in DC but constantly returned to the area, and moved back when I was 18. I had lost my job, cashed my paycheck, and gotten arrested in a 3 day span.

The police seized every dollar I had and my mom grudgingly took me back until I got another job. I stayed in the area until I was 25, moving back into DC to be closer to work for a few years before leaving the east coast.

I was a teenager in the early 2000s. We had cell phones^[1] and curfews. Yet the world was somehow freer and lighter. There was a kind of fog of war still. You got your news from the paper or the TV at night, Wikipedia wasn’t allowed as a proper source, and Google was barely entering the public lexicon as a verb. Options were limited, and choices were easier because of it.

I started skateboarding when I was 12, which led me to spend countless hours in the streets of my town and the greater DC area. I saw many things out there: made friends with local homeless people, made enemies with local security guards, and refilled the same Big Gulp cup an entire summer at 7-11 for $0.79.

I spent a lot of time out of the house in general. My memories at home are few. We often didn’t have anywhere to drink and would hang out in the parks in town. When I turned 18 I worked at the local dive bar waiting tables. I worked there on and off for three years, and became a regular frequenting the place until I left the area.

To this day scenes from this place haunt my dreams. Distorted, as dreams are, but they’re recognizable for sure. The train tracks where we got high, a part of a road through the trees, a specific part of a church grounds near my first girlfriend’s house. They reach up from the past trying to convince me that my memories are real.

They aren’t. That world doesn’t exist anymore. None of it. The houses have been torn down and replaced by mansions. The people I knew are gone. My friends have moved away. The bar is now a coffee shop, people glued to their phones and laptops. Many of the previous bar patrons I knew are dead.

The unconnected world is gone too. Connectivity and helicopter parenting have combined to rid children of the freedom to ride bikes around the neighborhood. Now when we watch movies and TV shows it seems hard to believe when the parents yell after their kids “Be back for dinner!”. This was the norm not long ago.

Now everyone and everything must be constantly monitored. That fog of war from lack of connectivity has been lifted. You have to be available. This place that haunts my dreams exists only in my mind now. I think we’re worse off for that.