The streets are the ones that you grew up on, the ones that you’ve known all of your life. You could walk without opening your eyes, and your feet would likely know the way, though it has been many months since they last followed these paths. Faces blur past in the hallways, familiar faces, but among them are new faces, ones you have never seen before. Perhaps you bump into one of the people behind the unknown faces and murmur a swift apology, feeling lost inside because this is a person you do not know, and have never known. You smile at those that you do know, even wave if someone calls your name, but it is a habit, and your mind is a thousand miles away.
Anything can take you back. A song, half remembered from a night long ago, or a scent, the perfume of a friend. You see the friends you lost in the faces of strangers, and you hear their laughs in the laughter of your friends here, and you close your eyes and wish as hard as you can to be there, and here, all at once.
The sense of loss is overwhelming. It fills your life, seeps in when you least expect it. Colors here are duller, words have less meaning, time seems to have frozen. You are trying to exist in two worlds, with ties to each and each so dear to you, and there is no way to ever bring them together.
The hardest thing is knowing that you are trapped, helpless to change anything and left with your memories and half a life that exists a world away. All you can do is live this life with the hope that someday you will be able to return. It may only be for a moment, an hour, a day, but that hope is what keeps you going. The hope that someday soon you will return to the life you left behind.