Nostalgia

I often lay in the late night, my eyes wide open in the dark. I stare at the ceiling as I can’t fall asleep, a lump in my throat that I can’t really swallow. I feel the surrounding sadness, lying low, ready to jump. 
Yet stuck. Like this unbearable sneeze that can’t get out of the nose, teasing you but never showing up. 
I am tired, drained, yet perfectly awake. 
I want to cry, to change my whole life, start from scratch, fresh, somewhere else. Differently. 

To forget the people I know, forget that I miss them. To forget the love I’ve lived, so I can forget they’re gone. 
To forget about the good moments so I forget they no longer exist. They are a vague souvenir that will fade with time, with the aging of my body, of my memory, of my entire being. To forget I am going to forget. 

To forget, what a terrible word, what a terrible fatality. I write to remember everything, and yet I know that in the very moment I do, memories are already twisted, reduced to a feeling, biased by a sensation. 

Sometimes scraps come to my mind, thanks to a scent, a word, a melody. And I fall down memory lane. I think about it, and I remember how good it was, but that it was before. That this time is over, and things have changed, inside and out. 

I look back on my broken friendships, my fallen romances. And I feel the loneliness. I wish I could go back to my foundations, my core, lost under these superficial layers, buried in the dust of routine and the parasites of the instantaneous. 

I meet new people, flit around social groups. I talk, I vomit words, trivialities, foolishness, and I feign to care about the others, their story, their thoughts, when mine take me back to those I knew the tale of. Those who continue to write the chapters of a life I no longer read. Because everyone is taken by their own stories, we forget to read the ones of those for whom our hearts awaken.

Those for who our hearts beat, to who we think about, who reassure us, who we truly love. Those who saw us cry, scream and laugh, everything all at once. Those who know our parents, those who cherish our lives as we cherish theirs. 

Nostalgia takes me, always in the worst time. It envelops me, wraps me, and prevents my sleep. It is the memory of what is gone, and it always comes to me at new beginnings. Beginnings are fragile things, because they are hanging by a thread. Like the seedling timidly growing out of the soil, we need to look after them, so they become stronger and never die. And these strong friendships I once built but now barely acknowledge, I always think about them when I water the new ones. 

I miss a big something, a past life, gone, brought down by the world around me. And I feel oppressed. Pressed. Urged to change, to go somewhere else, to feel better. Except that I don’t know how. 

More precisely, I know change demands courage to do what’s best, and I just don’t find it. I’m stuck. Stuck outside, in the cold. I just want to find my way and go back… home.