Your hometown shrinks every time you leave and come back. It didn’t change. Your map did.

The size of a place is a comparison rather than a fact. After a few months somewhere bigger, the same streets and shops read as smaller, because you have new things to measure them against. Nothing shrank. Your scale changed, which is exactly what happens to problems you used to find enormous.

Next time you come back from anywhere, notice what looks different before you adjust again. Write one line about it, because that noticing lasts about a day before the old scale resets itself.