The disorientation of walking through your school three years after you left it.

It’s the same, and not the same at all. The buildings are all there, the geography is unaltered, your mental map of where things are still holds faithful to the territory. But it’s no longer home—you’re just passing through. You can now only ever be passing through.

Not much has changed, and everything has changed. There may be a new restaurant in the student union, a new wing of the medical centre, a new donor’s name glistening in bronze adorning a building’s entrance. But also the community you knew has been swept away by the passage of years, and a new set of unnamed students populates the dirt paths and the quadrangles.

Not completely, though. Three years is not yet enough to completely wipe you from the community’s memory—the freshmen that you met in your final year still walk the campus grounds as seniors. There ought to be people here who could, in principle, recognise you. And this has bittersweet effects on your perception.

You tread your familiar paths, take detours to visit the vicinity of your department, retrace your old stomping grounds. You half-hope that someone will call your name—is that you, Jill? You were my TA!—but it never happens. What are you even doing? Don’t delude yourself. You were never a big name on campus, the chances are vanishingly small that anyone will make the connection. But technically you can’t rule it out for another year.

Sometimes you catch a glimpse of an old friend, someone who maybe you were never that close with but the way she dresses or walks or styles her hair gives you a jolt of recognition, and then two seconds later you realise that no, it’s not her at all, it’s just some random student who looked like her from afar. This happens disconcertingly often. Ghosts of your college-era acquaintances tremble in the chilled February air.

You come to understand that there are only a hundred or so distinct student archetypes, copied and pasted all over to fill the campus. The dreamy one with the long straight hair and the glasses. The spunky one with the short curls and the green peacoat. The short Asian with the purple streak. You’re bound to run into someone you think you know, and they’re invariably just a doppelganger. Just as unknown as you are.

Your very presence here confuses your mind’s accounting system. Haven’t you already filed this environment away under a different phase of life, a different heading? It’s like you’re walking through your own past. How does that make sense at all?

Perhaps in your travels you may come upon this place again, several years onward, and by then it will have slipped from the recent past into the distant past. You will know nobody, nobody will know you, and you will have made peace with that. But for now, though you may teeter on the cusp, you are still on the sunny side of oblivion. And how strange and beautiful the ghosts!