on the glimmering nostalgia of the things we miss but don’t want back

objects in mirror are sadder than they appear

Gaspar Uhas

Hi lovelies,

lately I’ve been missing certain seasons of my life. I don’t want to go back, but there’s something to be said for the frayed textures of memory, the songs played on my old chunky black iPod, the scents of years long gone, places forgotten and passed over. I wouldn’t go back to seventeen if you paid me, but I know her like the back of my hand. I feel the same about twenty-one, and twenty-seven; hell, even thirty, and thatwasjustayearagoIswear but it already feels more like a lifetime.

(or another timeline, dare I say. 🙃)

and what can be said for the memories that arise when I think back on those times? I can differentiate between seventeen and twenty-one easily. I remember seventeen as the taste of cigarettes and Captain Morgan and driving too fast with all the windows down and my long dark hair whipping in the wind like a flag unraveling. twenty-one was watching the music video for Lana Del Rey’s Ride far too many times and crawling into bed at all hours of the night, trying not to wake up the college roommate I shared a room with, with whom the only thing I could seem to agree upon was that we were starting to hate each other’s guts.

is it strange to miss iterations of me that were so grippingly sad? (or maybe it’s not myself I miss at all, and instead I’m being pulled toward the vicissitudes of the emotions attached to those times in my life, and the delicious addictiveness of my very own personal box of darkness.)

either way… it’s like I could feel, then, with an immensity of emotion almost as all-encompassing as the pain I was experiencing, that the moments being lived out were already becoming memories.

and does that make it true, then, that I’ll soon feel the same of the present? that I’ll eventually ache for the uncertainty I feel now, or that I’ll look back on this period through a hazy lens, as if with the nostalgia of the rearview mirror. objects in mirror were sadder than they appear.

and yet there’s a kind of hope in that, too, isn’t there?

I like to think so. that even though during those times when I felt my most alone, my most broken‚ or else angry and misunderstood to the point where I tore myself to shreds (I had the whole teenage angst thing covered, let me tell you, friends), I can still remember them with that kind of melancholic fondness that comes about when you read a book or watch a film with an ending so gorgeous and overwrought that you can’t help but cry.

…and then feel wrung out but strangely satisfied.

(did I mention I have a Cancer stellium? I’m sorry, sometimes I can’t help but be in my feels. or maybe we can just go ahead and blame it on the full moon.)

that brings us to here, now, to this place where I remind myself, and anyone else who needs to hear it:

You have nothing to prove to anyone but the older versions of you. and you can miss those iterations of yourself, but not want them back. you can carry certain things forward with you and simply—put the rest down. you can feel the sadness still, sometimes, and choose to keep moving forward.

Is there a certain season of your life that you can’t help but miss? I’d love to know.

xx

Kimia