I've been wondering when the pain of nostalgia left me. I used to suffer from it awfully. It'd sneak in on a ray of sunlight and wrap round my heart and pull tight. I'd be lost, suddenly, losing my way in the present and finding myself on a riverside, maybe the Vltava in Prague, where the afternoon sun slid through a glass of beer perched precariously on a cobbled wall and the lover next to me leant on the railing and smiled. Or maybe I'd be in Western Australia, kicking a bucket of grapes down a row as I snipped the vines, a friend on the other side of the row doing the same and making me laugh.

I'd remember how he kissed the tattoo on my shoulder blade, the mauve light of dawn made more extreme by the purple fabric of the tent we were in, thinking, knowing how much I'd miss him when we parted ways.

Being alone on a train to Cornwall, my forehead pressed against the glass, feeling lonely and hopeful at the same time.

And one day, you simply don't think about those moments.

https://youtu.be/kYqn3tyUJq0?si=rQX-bIOggp-VZjCW

The memories just - stop. Or come less frequently, or linger for mere seconds, not a day, where you long with all your heart for a moment that has passed. All that sugary sentiment has somehow dissolved into the stretch of time between the moment and now. And you let it go, at some point. Or maybe it just slipped through the fence around your heart and you hadn't noticed the hole.

To be fair, I don't care why I don't experience nostalgia any more, I'm just glad that I don't. I always found it so bloody painful. The people I would never see again. The moments you'd never get back. Dancing on a hillside to Beastie Boys on acid. Spinning on a tyre down a trout stream with dragonflies landing on your bottle of cider as you trailed it through the water to keep cool, and chatted about life with a friend you'd grow apart from. Your little boy's warm foot held in your hand as you both stole sleep from a lazy afternoon.

https://youtu.be/v3gz7AXIhkc?si=b2VVcBmvLek8hdwj

Maybe it's just that you learn, as you get older, that the current moment is the most precious one, and you know how quickly they go on by so you better pay attention. Maybe it's more fucked up that that - maybe the internet has pulled our attention so much out of the moment that you don't focus on what you're meant to remember. Maybe you've just grown up emotionally - you no longer get so caught up in things that remnants tangle in your lungs and stick in your arteries so that you can't unpick them, like burrs in a woolly scarf. You flow better.

Just like honey.

https://youtu.be/7EgB__YratE?si=NLPoJEtS7oarNMvj

This post is partly in response to @ablaze's #threetunetuesday - thanks for hosting it, as it's always a good excuse to go down memory lane with some good tunes.

With Love,

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