I grew up in a small city. The type that people in big cities call a small town even though it’s several times the size of a typical small town.

I remember my mother taking me shopping downtown. There was a health food store where she would buy me sesame sticks, a record store that also sold ice cream, a store that sold a combination of new age paraphernalia and collectible cards. There was also a multi-floor department store that was all boring things like clothes and home decor but that I liked visiting anyway because the employees would let me watch them use their pneumatic tube system and ring their call bell.

I don’t know if that’s what people mean when they talk about cities having character, but I remember my parents saying the town was losing its character when those stores began to close.

But there was still the mall. It had the bakery where I would buy cookies with pink frosting, and the cedar-scented bookstore where I would pick out stacks of young adult novels, and the music store with the huge poster racks I would flip through. And when they mall’s stores began to close, too, I would still ride my bike to the video game store to look through the shelves of games and read the vague descriptions on the back as I tried to figure out which ones seemed fun, or to the bagel cafe where I would read a book as I ate lunch.

To me, it seemed that the character people saw in cities was simply a reflection of themselves. However, this led me to the troubling question of why I couldn’t form those same connections with places in the city I lived in after my return to Earth.

There were places I would visit repeatedly. A vintage clothing store, a park, a used bookstore. But I didn’t feel the same type of contentment or connection with those places. At the bookstore, I would wander aimlessly, rarely taking books off the shelves, I would only walk the perimeter of the park, eyes on the sidewalk, and I would always find myself so nervous on entering the vintage clothing store that I could never spend more than a few minutes there.

The city just seemed like a collection of tall buildings in a different arrangement from what I was used to. If the city in which I lived had no character, then I wondered if I was missing something I’d had in my childhood. Had I lost my sense of self?