For better or worse, the places where you grow up get under your skin. A city that may be no more than a stopping place for a parent becomes drenched with meaning for you, their child, for it’s the place where you learned how to be. To the untrained eye your hometown might not seem like much more than a heap of telephone wires and crepe myrtle bushes—certainly you know now there are more exciting places to live—but for awhile, or maybe always, the place you grew up is the truest place you know.

I keep trying to grasp what makes a place feel like home but the specifics keep slipping through my fingers. Is it simply the abundance of memories? Or the most vivid place you felt secure and loved? Or the place where your younger self is forever memorialized? Or maybe a combination of all three, plus a little intangible extra? My family moved around enough during my formative years that I dreamed wistfully of growing up in a small town where everyone knew each other, a la Stars Hollow. What would it be like to have so much shared history in a place? I lamented the bonds that grew brittle with every move. But I had to have roots somehow; even though I was twelve by the time we moved to Oklahoma, it’s still the place I thought of as home for thirteen years.

Last week I traveled back to that hot, beautiful state to help my sister move to Michigan. Lurking on every street corner were ghosts of former lives lived, tantalizingly close but made elusive by the veil of time. We were here and we mattered, they whispered. In the afternoon, when everything was crystallized in a slick of shimmering heat, Mimi and I visited the pool we used to frequent. We treaded water and romanticized the naive people we used to be. Now that our parents have moved overseas, we wistfully realized Oklahoma doesn’t feel like home anymore. Cliche as it is, home isn’t home without your people, and in their absence we are having to learn new ways to be ourselves.

Is it a loss of identity we’re grappling with, or is it just growing up? It’s easy to think of the past as the way things should always be.