"Returned Home" by Jonah Van Dyke

I don’t feel like I have returned when I come home. The door now creaks when opened, and though my family greets me, they have changed. My siblings are bigger, my mother is smaller, and my father’s beard is evermore gray. My dog lazily wags his tail, no longer the wild puppy who would jump up onto me. His toys, now comically small, either hold on to their form with a few threads or have already been tossed out. Everything is minutely different, holding on to familiarity while becoming alien; it was not the home I remembered. My old bedroom seemed untouched, but the figures and books on my shelves, artifacts of a time when I would play and read for simple pleasure, have been preserved in a fine layer of dust. My closet is full of clothes that no longer fit, each with their own faint memory. My feet now dangle off the end of my bed. My mother calls me down to dinner. We eat a dish she never made when I was a kid and sit in a room I don’t know, but soon we begin to talk, tell stories, and laugh. Finally, I returned home.