We return to the location of a particularly memorable event-happening place, a death or a kiss or another feeling that outshines the other feelings in recent or unrecent memory. The location itself, in the three-dimensional structure we use to make sense of the world, is not where it once was and hasn’t been since its origin. The globe keeps spinning and even besides that is being hurled through space on the way to somewhere, never to find or see even with a squint this specific place again.
It’s not the position but the atmospheric environs that bring us back. A familiar aroma might rematerialize. The narrowing spectrum of colours could hit the rods and cones and optic nerves in the right light to regain the sense of faux or real nostalgia. This is enough to satisfy our conviction that the place is the same, even if as we established it most certainly is not and never will be again. An audible duplication is less likely, but every one heard during the visit will in some way line up in the mind with the initial sound in the now faraway location of the former happening. The surroundings too were subjected to the spin and the pull of the giant orb, the decreasingly oxygenated spaceship, but to the same degree as us – the similarity shared is enough to appease the need of returning to the scene of the memory.