I'm a perpetually homesick person. Always missing someone or something or somewhere or sometime. I've been to a lot of places, not always by my own choice, and I find myself always looking back like the nostalgic sap that I was born to be.

The other day I decided to go back through Google Maps to take a trek through some old familiar places from my childhood, and it felt positively dreamlike.

First I plopped myself in the middle of the busiest intersection in Scotts Valley, and I was shocked by how everything there shows up near perpetually in my dreams. It was like seeing one of my dreams in the waking world.

I explored around, looking at places that I used to walk through, marveling at the changes. New apartments built on the hill across the street from my middle school. It used to be a forested path that I liked to traverse on my way home, but now it's just another yuppy farm in a land filled to the brim with them.

I realized I hadn't spent much time in west Santa Cruz while passing through there. There is this big circular street that is not a roundabout going around this park with a church and I have no memory of it, but the markets around it have definitely been in my dreams.

At this point it feels like most of my memories of my hometown are in my dreams. But what really gets me is how much smaller it looks now.

I've popped back via google maps here and there. I used to do it to touch some small piece of what came before. But y'know, the places we find ourselves isn't just the background, it's also the people we knew there.

And so when I find myself floating disjointedly down the electronic hallways of google maps, I can't help but think about who isn't there. My parents, for one. Anyone I would ever call a friend wouldn't be found there. Even the bastards that made my stay there less than it could have been have mostly moved on.

Think I should do that? Move on? Would be nice if I knew how.

But those places from my early days feel so much larger than life. Is it because of my current banality? I don't have a bad life by most measures: I make a decent living, I have wonderful friends, I'm in pretty good shape. I'm inundated by the horrors like everyone else, and I miss the people who can't be with me on this leg of the adventure I'm on.

Still, in google maps the valley isn't that imposing, the buildings not so towering, the trees not as tall. I've never seen it like that before. It's been a very long time since I popped by last.

The house I grew up in isn't there anymore. They tore it down sometime in the early 2000s and replaced it with a lot for storing construction equipment.

That kinda confounds me, I think. The house I grew up in probably was once a cute ranch house with big oak trees off to the sides in the middle of an empty hilly field behind a bunch of stores. There was a bamboo forest around it, and was a very large piece of property with the closest neighbors being quite some distance away.

My Mom turned a big chunk of it into her own personal farmland for a while. My Dad used to work on the RV and the other cars out on the gravel. He built a chicken coup in the back yard where there was a fire pit.

The bamboo forest held many strange things, like a big ol' hen that lived there when we moved in and was very friendly to my Mom. She was killed by a neighbor's dog that was let out though. A different dog killed our pet rabbit a few years after that.

I'd sometimes find old pieces of furniture or other junk in the bamboo. I had a crummy little green table that I put in my room that I found while scrounging around the brush.

There was this plum tree just at the porch that would bear hundreds of tiny fruits each year. My parents would gather them up from the ground after shaking them all down, and then make dozens of jars of jam. Or maybe it's jelly, I can't remember which but my Dad was pedantic about it.

I fell out of that tree once. It's not too tall, but I fell and hit the concrete beneath and began crying. I think it was the first time in my life I'd gotten hurt and nobody noticed. I cried for a bit, kinda feeling confusion that nobody came over. My Mom was asleep and my Dad was at work. Eventually I dusted myself off and went on with my day.

There were a bunch of old engineering drafting tables in the yard under some tarps. My Dad had found them while dumpster diving at his company and thought they were cool. One of the many things he did was drafting designs for microchips and hard drives. One of our cats, Epo, passed away in her sleep under one of those tables when her heart gave out on a hot summer day on our last summer there.

Just past the bushes in the back was a little path that wound behind the shed past one of the big oak trees. Beyond that was a big empty grassy plain of a few acres, with tall mountains of dirt that had been there for so long they were covered in grass as well.

When I was growing up, my Dad had a few cars in various states of repair. Sometime around the 6th grade though, he had them all taken away. It felt like the beginning of the end of something.

Anyway, all of that is gone. The house, most of the bamboo forest, a couple trees that weren't protected by law, like the plum tree. The coup, the shed. The various pathways. Nobody would ever be able to guess that my family and I and probably many others in the past, had called the place home.

But the most infuriating thing is how I can't get to it. In google maps the driving path to get there goes through a parking lot and none of the google trucks have bothered going into that one. I can't see what they've done to the place. I can almost glimpse my house not being there, and I know it isn't there, but I can't see through all the overgrowth.

I heard a song recently that asks if your childhood home is lost and overgrown. I suppose it's fair to say that mine fits that description.

I don't know what I'm writing about at this point. Seeing all those lost places not quite completely lost has def impacted me in a way that is hard to describe, maybe a way that I'm not built to understand.

I won't forget those places though. I think even if I lost all my memories they'd still be a part of my dreams.