Nostalgia

I am, once again, typing this post in the kitchen counter in our home. A kettle half-filled with water is sitting in the stove and the coffee powder awaits in a cup, ready for the spill. A perfect pick-me-up for this fresh Saturday morning.

I woke up to the chirping of birds this morning. As I lay there in my old bed, strings of childhood memories flashed through me. Wow, how long has it been? Memories flashed in sepia toned photographs, me in the pictures, laughing, racing, crying, running around, playing with children in the neighborhood. I can hardly believe that my childhood friends now have children of their own. To me, we’re just kids with bonkers, drool and dirt on our faces. Now, we could not even say a simple hello to each other. It’s as if we’ve turned into strangers never to know one another ever again. How could we want to be someone else other than those kids that we were? We were happy. So happy that it makes me sad.

Sometimes my past seems more inviting than my future, because of the mere fact that it’s known. What I wouldn’t give to be the eight year old who caught a fish in a canal, who built forts with stools and sheets, who sold leaves as fish and priced bottle caps and candy wrappers more than anything, who believed in gumamela offerings to the angels, who used to bury things that brought bad memories in the ground. Sometimes I wonder if I took a misstep somewhere and if with that misstep I’m failing my eight-year-old self. I wonder if there’s any going back.

But then, sometimes I have brief, fleeting moments of clarity. I am twenty and though I have changed, left my hometown for college, displaced myself in the city, and having a life of my own that doesn’t involve them anymore, I am still as hopeful as that eight year old kid in those sepia toned pictures. And I know, I know that the best is yet to come. That my days of forts and bottle caps and candy wrappers are not over. That love, as I know it, is only the beginning and that there are no missteps, no wrong turns, that every good day, every bad, every right decision, every wrong, will lead me to exactly where I’m meant to be.

Maybe it’s just a fact of life. We meet people and have good times with them and you believe it’ll last. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself in periods of bittersweet nostalgia. We move on, we grow apart and eventually forget them in this blurry, hurried life. Maybe, this period of bittersweet nostalgia is exactly where I’m meant to be. This is one moment in my life where I feel human, capable of feeling and love, and I remember to give thanks. This remembering, this is beautiful.