I used to be particularly nostalgic; it was something that drove Kate mad when we first met, that I’d just expound on younger days when I had more hair as if they possessed some special magic that would explain everything, some weird and wonderful truth about the way the world — or, at least, I — worked. And then, somehow, I stopped. I’m not sure how or why, but it was as if I lost my affection for everything that had come before, and started living in the now, as someone somewhere would call it.
This all came back to me this weekend, when I had a dream in which I found photographs of people I’d gone to art school with, two decades ago now. My reaction in the dream is still oddly fresh in my mind — an affection, tempered with this feeling of I haven’t even thought about these people in forever. That’s not actually true, though; I think about them these days, but it’s in a contemporary, what-are-they-up-to-now way from seeing their posts on Facebook or Twitter or whatever. Instead of being all swallowed up by “THOSE WERE THE DAYS” garment-wrenching, it’s a “Ah, they’re the greatest, what times we had” thing.
I don’t know; it’s tough to explain. The me I was then feels like an entirely different person, now. It’s harder to want to be them again, now that I’ve realized just how ridiculous, uncertain and annoying I was from the viewpoint I have these days, I guess.