Going Back to Austin: What It Feels Like to Return to a City That Raised You

There is a particular feeling that comes with driving back into a city you used to live in. Not quite nostalgia, not quite homecoming. Something in between that has no clean word for it.

I drove into Austin in June and felt it almost immediately. I lived there for nearly ten years, through undergrad and grad school, my first jobs, and a whole era of my life that shaped most of who I am now. I have been in Boston long enough to call it home, but Austin is a different kind of home, the kind you carry with you rather than return to.

The UT tower was the first thing I spotted against the skyline, and something about seeing it just sitting there, unchanged, while everything else in the city has shifted and grown around it, felt like the whole trip in one image. Austin has changed a lot since I left. It keeps changing. That is the thing about Austin, it is always becoming something new while somehow staying itself entirely. The energy is still there. The murals are still there, some new ones, some the same. The food trucks are still doing what food trucks in Austin do, which is to say better than most restaurants anywhere else.

I spent time in the neighborhood I knew best and did that thing you do when you revisit a place, looking for the version of yourself that used to live there, finding traces of it in corners and side streets, and in the particular way the light falls in the late afternoon. I ate well. I walked around more than I planned. I took photos of things that probably would not mean much to anyone who had not been there the way I had.

New England is home now and genuinely, fully home. But Austin is the city that had me for nearly a decade, and some part of me is probably always going to be a little bit Austin. Every time I go back, I remember why.

Hook 'Em.