Your hometown will change while you’re gone. The pizza place closes, the field gets paved. Carry the good parts with you.

Places do not hold still for you. A favorite shop shuts, the empty lot becomes apartments, the field where everyone hung out gets fenced off, and going back restores none of it. What you are attached to was never really the building; it was a particular stretch of time that happened to be housed there.

Since a town cannot be preserved, take the portable parts: photograph what matters while it is still open, learn the recipe, keep the people. Then let the map change without deciding that what happened there stopped counting.