The place you leave keeps its daily life after your story moves elsewhere.

A place you left carries on without any reference to you. The shop reopens, the neighbours have a difficult spring, the tree comes down, and none of it arranges itself around your absence. It is easy to keep somewhere frozen at the moment you departed, as scenery for a chapter that ended. Discovering it went on living is disorienting and also a relief, because it means nothing there is waiting.

If you go back somewhere you used to live, expect a place rather than a memory and let the differences be interesting. And if you cannot go back, allowing it to have changed lets you have changed too.