There’s a street I used to walk every day. A narrow road, uneven in places, where rainwater pooled in forgotten dips along the pavement. I knew every crack, every familiar turn. At the far end, just before it curved out of sight, there was a small tea stall. The kind that never changed, no matter how much the city around it did.
The owner never asked for my order. He just knew. A silent understanding passed between us in nods and half-smiles, in the way he placed the cup in front of me before I even sat down. I liked the ritual of it—the warmth of the cup between my fingers, the quiet hum of conversations blending with the faint clatter of metal spoons against glass. The world outside the stall always felt fast, rushing forward in its endless hurry, but there, time moved slower.
It had been years since I last walked that street. Life happened, the way it always does, pulling me in different directions, making the familiar seem distant. But I found myself back there recently, almost by accident, turning onto that road with a vague sense of longing for something I couldn’t quite name.
The tea stall was gone.
In its place, a nameless shop with bright glass windows, its reflection swallowing the space where something once stood. I paused, standing in front of it, searching for traces of what had been. But the ground held no memory of the wooden counter, the old tin kettle, the scent of steeping leaves that once hung in the air. The man who knew my order was nowhere to be found.
I tried to summon the details from my mind, but they were slipping—blurred at the edges, like an old photograph fading with time. I could still see glimpses of it if I concentrated: the way steam curled from the cup on cold mornings, the rhythm of the owner’s hands as he worked, the faint crack in the stall’s wooden frame that I used to trace absentmindedly while waiting. But how much of it was real? And how much was just my mind filling in the gaps, reconstructing something that had already begun to disappear?
It’s strange how places vanish twice. First, in the real world, erased and replaced by something new. Then, in our minds, as the weight of time pulls at the memories, softening their edges until they become unreachable. I wonder how long it takes for something to truly be forgotten.
Do memories have a vanishing point? A moment when they blur so completely into the past that even our longing cannot retrieve them? Maybe that’s why nostalgia exists—to hold onto what time tries to take away.
Yet, even as I stood there, trying to grasp what was already gone, I realized something: perhaps not everything truly disappears. Maybe places like that don’t live on in their physical forms, but in the quiet details we carry forward. In the way a certain breeze brings a familiar scent, in the way a sip of tea on an ordinary day suddenly tastes like a different time, in the way we sometimes turn a corner and feel the ghost of something we once knew.
Maybe that’s how things survive—not in perfect recollections, but in the spaces between forgetting.