Lost in Locality

Although I had a difficult time feeling lost in a physical sense, I found myself feeling very out of place while I was back in my hometown over the weekend.

Many of my friends from highschool are still there. I have many close friends there, but for the first time it has really struck me how different our lives are becoming. Many of them have decided that college was not for them and have moved into apartments around town. Our lives are starting to look very different. I found it hard to talk about a lot of things relating to school, and to the future.
For the first time, it became hard for me to imagine living in my hometown. I have kind of had this idea that I would finish school and move back, maybe get a place with some old friends and help my parents out for a while. Over the course of this weekend, that idea seemed to make less and less sense. My familiarity with this place, the people and houses, businesses and ways to pass time began to seem foreign, something I knew so well but could no longer understand. Barely anything has changed in the town since I and my friends have graduated high school. There are a few less of us, as we have began to spread out, but many remain. I however, was very different. I felt like I had traveled back in time, the present me hanging out with friends in the past. It was only a few weeks ago that I was in town doing very much the same thing, visiting friends and hanging out. But this time it finally was hitting me.
They have gone through much change of course, grown up a lot and experienced much I'm sure. But in many ways it was like they had been stuck in the film Groundhog day while I snuck out of the theater to have a cigarette or something. Very surreal. It was still a great time, but it made me question; how will my relationship with this place and those people change in the next few years?