18 again: I returned to my life in 1990. Who – and what – would I find there?

I doused myself in Poison perfume and made the trip back to my childhood home, friends and college. What could I learn by re-immersing myself in a world that brimmed with hope and potential? The house in which I turned 18 was full of clocks. Dark wooden things with aged faces. Every room ticked.

If you stood in certain doorways, you could hear all the misaligned second hands racing. I could not understand why anyone would want to count away life like that or decorate their living quarters with so many symbols of mortality. There was no escaping time. Shortly before each hour, a mechanical whir heralded the first chime. We lived in a…