The City That No Longer Exists

かえりたい

あのころの

ゆうぐれ

want to return / to those days / the dusk

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People ask me: “What city do you want to visit next? Is it Rome? Is it Kyoto? Is it Buenos Aires?”

They expect me to name a place on a map. They expect a coordinate that can be found on a GPS.

I looked at the departures board. I looked at the scrolling list of bright, modern destinations.

“None of them,” I said.

“The place I want to visit does not accept flights anymore. It doesn’t even exist in this time zone.”

I want to go back to my village. But not the village as it stands today, with its fiber optic cables and its paved roads.

I want to go back to the village before the turn. Before the technology curve went vertical like a hockey stick. Before the screen became a wall between us and the world.

The Warmth of the Giant’s Hand

I want to visit a Tuesday afternoon in 1996.

In this city, I am very small. My perspective is low to the ground. The world smells of dust and laundry detergent.

I am walking down a dirt road. I am holding my mother’s hand.

That is the entire itinerary: Holding her hand.

Her hand feels huge, warm, and invincible. In that moment, there is no vibration in her pocket. There is no notification pulling her mind away to a server in California. There is no email waiting.

She is entirely there. She is looking at the trees. She is looking at me. We are walking at the speed of human legs, not the speed of information.

I want to go back to that specific silence. The silence where you could hear the wind moving through the wheat, and you knew, with absolute certainty, that you were the most important thing in her universe.

The Analog Tribe

I want to walk to the playground at the edge of the woods.

In the city I live in now, the parks are full of parents staring at blue light, and children taking photos of the slide.

In the village of the past, the playground is a war zone. It is raw. It is real.

I want to see the version of myself that had scraped knees and dirty fingernails. I want to see my friends—not their avatars, not their profiles—but them.

We are running. We are screaming. We are playing a game with rules we invented five minutes ago. There is no record of this game. No one is filming it. No one is posting it.

If we are bored, we sit in the dirt and look at ants. We do not scroll. We dissolve into the boredom until it becomes imagination.

We were more human then. We were animals, happy and tired, running under a sun that felt yellow, not white. We were not users. We were just boys.

The Ghost Town

But I know the truth.

If I bought a ticket to that village today, I would not find it. The houses are there, but the air has changed. The signal is everywhere now. The invisible web has covered the roofs.

The village I want to visit is a ghost town. It exists only in the amber of memory.

I want to go back not because I hate the future, but because I miss the weight of reality. I miss being a person who was defined by who he was with, not who he was connected to.

I want to feel the rough skin of my mother’s hand, unmediated by a device. I want to feel the exhaustion of running until my lungs burn, unmeasured by a fitness tracker.

I want to go home.

But the train only goes forward. So I sit in my seat, I close my eyes, and for a moment—just a moment—I let myself walk down that dirt road, feeling the warmth of a sun that set a long time ago.