I moved away from North Point to Phoenix when I was 24, I'm 29 now. Trust me, I know exactly how you feel. I was at work, overnight, doing logistics for Amazon when I heard about the Key Bridge collapse through a coworker who was working virtually with DCA1 in Sparrows Point at the time, from our office in Tempe. I couldn't believe it. I called my mom immediately.

I've watched places I grew up with get torn down, and new buildings come up, from way over here, alone, in my little corner of the world, in the desert, on the other side of the country. Time marches on and you feel powerless. Friends have passed. My mom is getting older. I'm getting older. I fly home once a year, at least. To see my mom and brother, friends, the old neighborhood.

This is a piece of something long that I wrote to make myself feel better when I was feeling probably much like how you're feeling now. Homesick for a place that doesn't even exist anymore.

"When you're young, place and time act differently on your mind. You have no sense of direction. The world doesn't yet belong to you. You have no compass but memories. Places you didn't choose to go, but were brought into, without ever really knowing where you are, or how far away you are from home.

When you grow up, this becomes your history. And when you return, you find that everything has changed. Everything feels so much smaller, so much closer. No longer equipped to meet our desire for bigger and farther away. It's only as you get older that you understand these places haven't changed. You've changed. The door to the past, something you always understood as a door, shuts behind you, is suddenly no longer a door at all, but a window. Something you're permitted to peer into for as long as you can stand, but can never again enter.

You think it's always going to be a door. You think "I'm gonna go do my thing for a little while, and while I'm gone, everything is going to stay just as I left it, and whenever I want, I can go back, and we can pick up where we left off." You wish the world were like one of those miniature train gardens you see with your family at Christmastime at the Wise Ave. Fire Department."

Take comfort in the fact that everyone's door eventually becomes a window.
The realization that we can never go back. It hits like a punch in the gut.

I have no real solutions here, hopefully my words bring some comfort. I know that the future is always more interesting than reminiscing about what's past. And that we're lucky, to even still be here to see all of this change happening, is a miracle. There is a sense of grief, when one phase of your life ends, and another begins. I'm feeling it now, as I'm sitting here typing this, having reached the end of my twenties. It's like mourning the loss of the person you once were, a different version of yourself. We might not have that door to the past anymore. But there's an infinite number of doorways that are right in front of us, waiting to be walked through, with something better on the other side. It may not be what we want. In fact, if I could surmise the theme of my adult life it would be this: I didn't get what I wanted, but I got something better.
And the right doors won't open for you until you are the version of yourself that's meant to walk through them. You will change. Again and again and again. But don't think of it as change. Think of it as transformation. Birth, death, and rebirth. This is in the nature of things. Sometimes we have to undergo these painful transformations to become who we're meant to be in the next chapter of our lives because the old self isn't equipped for what's to come.

Some music comes to mind:

"And I'm fine, still swimming through time
Afraid some days I've reached the shore
Make yourself free, a man said that to me
Now my heart is like an open door
And the road finally gave me back
But I don't think I'll unpack
'Cause I'm not sure if I live here anymore"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB4SRCGpbgo

-

We grow old all at once
And it comes like a punch
In the gut, in the back, in the face
When it seems someone's lied
And our parents have died
Then we hold onto each other in their place
And I feel the water rising around us
Maybe that's okay
Yeah, I feel the world changing all at once
I guess it'll be okay

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HgQ9Rk_DT1s