Some days feel like walking through thick fog.

You know the path is there, but each step requires more trust than certainty.

The familiar becomes strange, and the strange becomes routine.

Twenty years ago, I left this country. Now, returning for Christmas and New Year’s, I’m both a native and a foreigner.

My biggest challenge isn’t the language, which still lives in my mouth despite new slang I don’t know. My biggest challenge isn’t the changed streets or the foreign brands replacing corner shops. Not the convenience stores’ LED glare.

No, my biggest challenge is how every corner of this city holds shadows I’ve spent twenty years learning to live with. Memories surge up without warning. A door slams – my shoulders tense. The smell of boiling cabbage drifts from an open window, and suddenly I’m somewhere else. Somewhere twenty years ago. Somewhere I fought to leave.

The past doesn’t live in nostalgia here. It lives in muscle memory. Counting change before ordering coffee. Stocking up on bread “just in case.” My bank account says abundance but my body whispers scarcity. Every purchase becomes a complex equation: Do I need this? Can I afford this? Will there be enough? Calculate. Recalculate. Breathe. My rational mind knows I’m safe now, but my hands still count every bill twice.

What no one tells you about returning home after two decades is how it turns you into a time traveler.

You exist in multiple versions simultaneously: the person you had to be then, the person you’ve become, and somewhere in between, a version of yourself that only exists in the fog of your readjustment. Each day, you navigate between being secure and being scared, between remembering everything and wishing you could remember nothing at all.