Why do we keep returning to
places that no longer exist?

Not places that have been demolished — though those too. I mean the places that still stand but have become something else entirely. The café that is now a bank. The park bench where something important was decided, now surrounded by construction hoarding. The street that used to feel a certain way and no longer does.

We go back looking for something that was never stored there to begin with.

There is a particular cruelty in returning to somewhere significant and finding it unchanged. Because then the only thing that has moved is you. The café is exactly as it was. The light falls the same way through the same window. The problem, you realise, is not the place at all.

I think about this a lot when I travel — which is perhaps why I travel the way I do. Slowly. With some suspicion of nostalgia. I am not looking for the feeling of having been somewhere before. I am trying to have the feeling of being somewhere for the first time, over and over, in places that other people have already decided how to feel about.

There is a word in Portuguese — saudade — that gets brought up constantly in these conversations as though one word can explain the entire phenomenon of longing for something gone. I am sceptical of the import of untranslatable words. Every language has them because every experience resists translation. The experience of returning to a changed place has no clean word in English either. That does not make it Portuguese.

What I am trying to say is this: the places we return to are not the places we left. They cannot be. We are different; they are different; the distance between is different. We are conducting an experiment with a changed apparatus every single time.

And yet we keep going back. What are we actually looking for?

I do not have a clean answer. I'm not sure the question needs one. Some things are more useful as open questions than as solved ones. This might be one of them.