A cashier asked me last week, completely casually, ringing up a fairly embarrassing number of frozen dinners for someone who edits manuscripts about human behavior for a living, how long I’d lived here, and I said something like “oh, about six years” without really thinking about it, the answer I’ve apparently had loaded and ready for a while now. Drove home, did actual math in my head at a red light for reasons I can’t fully explain, and realized it’s been nine. Not six. Nine years, in a town I still mentally file under “moved here recently” despite having lived here longer at this point than I lived in the town I actually grew up in.

I don’t know exactly when the internal clock stopped updating. I think there’s a specific number of years, different for everyone probably, past which a place should stop counting as new, and I clearly blew past mine a while ago without noticing, still telling people a rounder, smaller, more recent-sounding number out of some habit I never consciously decided to keep. It’s not that I don’t feel at home here. I have a Thursday night group that’s been meeting in some form for years, I have a walk I do every October, I have opinions about which coffee shop’s good on which day of the week that only somebody who’s actually lived somewhere develops. By every real measure this is where I live, not where I’m staying.

But there’s still some small persistent part of my brain that files myself as a visitor here, temporarily, the way you’d describe a long work trip rather than a life, and I think it’s because the actual moving day, the specific arrival, still feels recent to me in a way the calendar disagrees with completely. Memory doesn’t update linearly like that, apparently, some anchor points just stay vivid and close regardless of how much actual time has piled up on the other side of them. I remember the drive in with startling clarity, what was playing on the radio, which exit I almost missed, and that memory being so sharp seems to be tricking the rest of my brain into thinking the whole nine years since barely happened.

I’ve decided, mostly out of stubbornness now, to actually correct myself out loud the next time somebody asks, to say nine, properly, and see if saying the real number out loud a few times finally updates whatever internal counter’s been stuck. It feels like a small experiment worth running on myself. Either the number starts to feel true, or it doesn’t and I learn something a little uncomfortable about how loosely my sense of my own life is actually tracking against the calendar everyone else is using. Either way, I’m not from here originally, and increasingly I think that’s just going to be permanently true no matter how long the actual math says I’ve stayed.