Nostalgia trip
Every now and again I engage in a nostalgia trip: diving back into whatever remnants of the past I have in my possession and forgetting today for yesterday. Call it escapism, it is often masochistic and always wonderful. Even if I return to today with sadness, it is tinged with the joy of feeling, of knowing how much I actually felt. This is a thing I have: its so important to feel things to their fullest. Krista calls it my squishy heart.
Here's the thing. My squishy heart demands that I hang on to everything I can from the past, specifically to allow me to dip back into it when the mood strikes me. So to this end, I have poems I wrote in at fifteen, high school yearbooks, ICQ conversation logs from second year, archives of email messages and photographs, boxes and envelopes full of the tangible remains of my relationships, and of course this blog. Some of these have been taken home in aid of making my move in April as painless as possible, but much of it remains at my fingertips, electronically stored for posterity.
Today I engaged in some brutally hedonistic reminiscing. So what? I have time (relatively), and I am not in danger of falling back into some of my more damaging practices. It left my evening somewhat wrecked, my mind occupied with thoughts of love, life and the grand questions. I blame my current (and certainly selfish) obsession with my own existence. Its not like I am living in the past, but sometimes its important to realise how far I have come and in doing so realise how far I have yet to go. Seeing how much has changed, how much is still the same. Wondering how so many years can be summed up in a few lines of text, a single book, a few bytes on my hard drive. Asking the grand questions.
Am I crazy? Is this escapism healthy? Normal? Bah. I never liked words like normal anyways. It makes me happy to remember. And if the past few years have taught me anything, its that more can happen in a few years than you can ever hope to hold on to, but the really important memories are so deeply embedded that reading an old email can bring it all flooding back.
Here's the thing. My squishy heart demands that I hang on to everything I can from the past, specifically to allow me to dip back into it when the mood strikes me. So to this end, I have poems I wrote in at fifteen, high school yearbooks, ICQ conversation logs from second year, archives of email messages and photographs, boxes and envelopes full of the tangible remains of my relationships, and of course this blog. Some of these have been taken home in aid of making my move in April as painless as possible, but much of it remains at my fingertips, electronically stored for posterity.
Today I engaged in some brutally hedonistic reminiscing. So what? I have time (relatively), and I am not in danger of falling back into some of my more damaging practices. It left my evening somewhat wrecked, my mind occupied with thoughts of love, life and the grand questions. I blame my current (and certainly selfish) obsession with my own existence. Its not like I am living in the past, but sometimes its important to realise how far I have come and in doing so realise how far I have yet to go. Seeing how much has changed, how much is still the same. Wondering how so many years can be summed up in a few lines of text, a single book, a few bytes on my hard drive. Asking the grand questions.
Am I crazy? Is this escapism healthy? Normal? Bah. I never liked words like normal anyways. It makes me happy to remember. And if the past few years have taught me anything, its that more can happen in a few years than you can ever hope to hold on to, but the really important memories are so deeply embedded that reading an old email can bring it all flooding back.
posted by Care @ 6:05 a.m.
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