Nostalgia

The best kind of pain. Pain for what we once loved and now lost. The ability to know what it was once like is a privilege. It’s hard to quantify the feeling; the simple 1–10 chart is unreliable in this circumstance. The empty pit in your stomach, hollow without the filling of being in that moment. Recalling dancing in the snow to Ventura Highway with your first love, the laughter of your best friend who you’ve lost touch with, remembering the route home from middle school and the stops at mom-and-pop shops along the way—the duality of these memories so icy hot. To try and hold or replicate these moments will burn, but the craving lingers nonetheless. It’s hard to recognize that every moment is fleeting—that is, until it’s past. Yet the feeling still remains. The yearning. To turn back time, or move it forwards so far the feeling is gone. It’s one of those feelings that swallows the brain, warping neurons and resting itself in the crevasses. People think time eats away at the feeling, when in reality it feeds it, and in return the hunger grows. The gluttonous pit stops for no one, but everyone stops for the pit, even just for a moment, just in admiration. The recollection of what once was but will never again be. What it felt like to be truly loved; the feeling of real relaxation without grinding teeth or flinching at a raised hand. There is nothing equivocal to the first kiss with your first love—irreplaceable and inimitable. The fear, the heat, the moment itself is minuscule, but the memories of it are immortal. The fixation on these moments is so strong it will stop us from creating similar memories due to the fear of feeling this way again, or fear of drowning out the memories we’ve grown so fond of. We believe these things push us apart when they bring us closer than ever. The connection of the human experience is to feel. To yearn, to cry, to fight—to feel is to live. Without it, we are just ghosts recalling the past with stone-like expressions. The only way to fill the gluttonous pit is to share the moments and create memories to feed it once more.