Things Change But Not Always Forward

On Detroit, going home, and what stays when everything else shifts

I am on the second leg of my US tour and Detroit was everything I needed it to be and then some.

I left here twenty years ago for college in Chicago and never really looked back. The visits since then have mostly been for funerals, in and out, heavy and quick. So coming back this time, for my high school reunion, for family, for something celebratory for once, felt significant before I even landed.

What I was not prepared for was how much it would feel like holding two things at once.

Downtown Detroit has changed in ways that are genuinely exciting. There is energy there now, new bars, new life, new people discovering something worth discovering. And I watched all of it with this complicated feeling that I could not fully name at first. The feeling of watching a place you grew up in get appreciated by people who did not have to grow up in it. Who did not know it when it was harder. Who are arriving now for the version of it that exists after all the work was already done. That is not resentment exactly. It is something more complicated than that.

And then you drive a few miles in any direction and it looks more like the city I remember. Which is its own kind of feeling.

My grandmother's house is gone. The neighbors tore it down and now it is just an empty lot. My childhood home is still standing but it is not the same. The people who have it now have not kept it up and driving past it was its own kind of quiet grief.

That house was a point of pride. It represented something solid and cared for and intentional. Seeing it the way it is now hurt in a way I was not prepared for, the specific ache of a place that meant everything to you existing now in a version that does not know it mattered.

That is what nobody tells you about going home after a long time away. It is not that you cannot go back. You can. But some of what you are going back to exists only in your memory now and you do not always know which parts until you are standing in front of them.

And yet.

The reunion was genuinely wonderful. I went to a small private high school, only sixty of us in our class, and there were twenty five of us that night. I laughed, I reconnected, I made plans. Some of them are already talking about coming to see me in Austin and the book release party is officially in the works. And getting to see family I have not seen in decades alongside the ones I talk to regularly, all in the same week, was something I did not know I needed as much as I did.

Detroit raised all of us and you can feel it in how people carry themselves here. This city makes hustlers. People who know how to keep going when things are not moving forward. I did not realize until this trip how much of that is in me too.

You can never go home, the saying goes. But I think what that really means is that home changes while you are away and you have to grieve the version of it you carried with you before you can appreciate the version that is still there. The house is not what it was. The people are. And maybe home was never the house anyway.

Detroit, thank you for a great week.

New York is next and I have not spent real time there in years. It is its own kind of memory lane and I am ready for it. More on that next week.

Après Me,

Sherita