The Street I Grew Up On

The first thing I noticed when I walked back into my old street was the silence.

It wasn’t the silence of peace, but of absence. The kind of silence that feels like a missing piece in a song you once knew by heart. The narrow road where our laughter used to echo now felt smaller, heavier, almost like it had aged with me.

The houses had changed their colors—bright blues replaced with dull grays, whitewashed walls now layered with cracks and dust. Windows that once burst open with voices, radios, and children leaning out to wave, were now firmly shut, like they were guarding secrets no one wanted to share anymore.

I paused under the old tree. Its trunk was still there, thicker now, its branches reaching out like tired arms. This was the tree under which we played endless games of cricket, where we shared our first victories and defeats, where secrets were whispered and friendships sealed. Standing beneath it now, I could almost hear the faint echoes of our childhood—but they faded quickly, swallowed by the emptiness around me.

I remembered my best friend. He was always the loudest, the one who dragged us out into the street no matter the weather. Now, he lives in another country, chasing a different life. We barely speak anymore. I wondered if he too ever thinks of this street, of those evenings when nothing mattered except how long we could play before our parents called us in.

Then there was her. The girl who used to lean on the balcony every evening, pretending she wasn’t watching us, but her eyes gave her away. For a long time, her quiet presence became part of the rhythm of our days. I don’t know where she is now. Maybe married, maybe gone far away. Maybe she too passes by some old place, remembering a younger version of herself.

And of course, the tea stall. A small corner shop with rusty benches and a kettle that never stopped boiling. We would sit there, talking about dreams that felt larger than life. One of us wanted to be a writer, another an engineer, one wanted to travel the world. We believed anything was possible. That stall is gone now, replaced by a concrete shop with no soul. Dreams, it seems, vanish as easily as places do.

As I stood in the middle of the street, I felt an ache I couldn’t explain. Time had moved forward, relentlessly. The street hadn’t just changed—it had outgrown me, or maybe I had outgrown it. The laughter, the faces, the smells of home-cooked food, the sound of cricket bats striking balls, the shopkeeper’s scolding voice—all of it lived only in memory now.

I closed my eyes for a moment and thought: What if streets could speak? What stories would they tell of the people who once belonged here, of the children who filled their walls with noise, of the dreams that once hung heavy in the air? Would my street remember me the way I remember it? Or was I just another passerby now, a stranger who once belonged but no longer fit?

Walking away, I realized something: home isn’t always a place. Sometimes home is a time, a moment, a collection of people who made an ordinary street feel extraordinary. And once those people scatter, the street remains—but it’s never the same again.

I left that day with the street still behind me, but a piece of it stayed lodged in my chest. The street I grew up on may never be mine again, but it will always carry the ghost of the boy I used to be.