Nostalgia

Watching Les Miserables the other day managed to stir an on-going, deep-rooted longing... perhaps little more than the vague remembrance of a past life. Sometimes I miss France, but it’s more like missing something about the air, the culture, the landscapes… childhood.

I used to be so sure that nothing would ever change. I remember so well sitting in my bedroom in Paris as a moody teenager, looking out the window dreamily and thinking that this would always be my life. I remember how certain I felt. And even when my life changed overnight, it felt more like a temporary glitch rather than a new constant. I spent several years believing, or wanting to believe, that we would somehow go back to the way things were. This was of course a delusion. Things are never the same twice. With the advent of things like social media people from my past started to spring back into my life, always asking the same questions: “what happened to you?.... where did you go?... Why didn't you tell me?...”

It makes me feel cornered, at a loss for words. What do these ghostly faces from the past want to hear from me? Their adult faces now shock me: my memory of them was frozen in time and I remember only the faces of children. I want to flee, have them forget about me, this person I was that is no more. I want to tell them that this is wrong: we lose touch with people for a reason, surely. We lose touch with people throughout our lives as a sign that things change - that nothing lasts - but today all these lines are blurred. The past is pulled out from the dark recesses of our minds to haunt our present and the future is erased in favour of instant gratification. 

Seemingly useless questions like “why? What’s the meaning of all this?” come to mind often, only to be greeted by a wall of silence. Sometimes I’ll make an effort and focus on an answer, only to realise that there are as many potential answers as I can possibly create or think them. But meaning is all that we have, and so we must find one. Whichever one we pick is still better than having none at all.