Something I remember from returning back to Scotland two years ago now — and somehow, it’s already two years ago, which is wild to me; suddenly, it makes more sense that I managed to go more than a decade without traveling back in the first place — was the feeling of places I remembered just simply not existing anymore. In some cases, that could be taken literally, because entire streets and neighborhoods had been reshaped and remade in the time I’d been gone so that they simply did not exist at all anymore; in others, it was because I remembered a previous tenant at a particular location, or a storefront that had closed years earlier, if not decades.
It’s a strange by-product of creating so many psychogeographical maps of locations in my past. When I think about Glasgow, I specifically think about a Glasgow of a quarter-century ago or more, the time I was in the city most often and had regular haunts. The Glasgow in my head, the one that is filled with personal flagstones and places that are filled with such specific significance for me that I could never hope to fully explain if I had years to try, is a ghost now, with so much lost to makeovers and reconstruction and simply the passage of time. There’s an entire history of the city that’s just gone now, I discovered with no small amount of sadness.
This hit me the hardest, I think, when walking around the area where all my old comic shops had been; none were there anymore, and that was the strangest feeling given how many hours I’d spent in each of them across the years. One of the shops still existed in a new location, and another had a new comic shop replacing an old favorite in its old location. (The new one was basically a toy shop that sold a handful of comics; my heart sank, but that’s what the kids want now.) It’s embarrassing if I think about how each of those old shops fed into the me I am now, but somehow even more so given that they’re all entirely gone if you visit the city today. An entire history of me that only I know, with no sign left to the rest of the world.