Nostalgia

I open the old cd wallet: black and yellow, worn and faded, the last present my friends ever gave me before I went away. Forgotten music, times unintentionally pushed from present consciousness. Bands we loved and then abandoned. Songs that we thought were written just to apply to our own individual struggles in surviving through this time warp of life. This is something worth keeping from the tattered box I am sitting here unpacking. Sifting through old memories, deciding what is worth tossing in trash, and what is worth carrying into my future for a while longer.

I take out a cd and slip it into my stereo. They say the sense of smell can send you back in time faster than any other, but this experience with sound would certainly be a good competitor. I feel like I could be back in Hamilton. I feel like I am back in Hamilton. I know where I am, I know where I last heard it. My old room. Packing. New art books and pencils. Lace tablecloths. E-mails to people I thought were caring. Blinds closed. Friends at my door. Small room, blue walls. Guitar. The strange teenage smell of closed rooms and old food and unwashed clothes. Sad. But familiar. Home. That is where I am.

It’s as if the music has carried my emotions from the past along with it as I have continued to traverse through life – it’s a time capsule of my feelings that I have left undiscovered for so long. The footpaths of that town that were so familiar to me, the suburbs I walked every day. The friends who I actually felt knew me better than the rest of the world ever would. It was a time when I felt some sort of tangible connection to life, some stability in my existence. Meaning. A time when these things were unremarkables that I took for granted and didn’t think were necessities.

It was no different to most people, growing up. We all think we’re independent; we want to be free, individual, somewhere different. But as I sit here, I wonder if I had it all wrong. What is my life now? What does it mean? My small apartment, hotel like in it’s coldness and uniformity. I live in it, but it has no life. There are no memories here, no objects that hold any relevance in the general scheme of my existence. Harsh furniture to unpack from my last apartment down the road. Clean walls. The photographs, posters, obsessions, happiness, sadness, art, love and life have all been muted down into a mundane sense of sensibleness. Sensibleness I don’t care for anymore. New places I don’t care for anymore. It is this place I don’t care for anymore.

Acquaintances I need to make an effort to spend a good deal of time with. Streets that don’t feel like home to me. A city, a country, a life, that doesn’t feel like home to me. Tropical beaches and huge shopping malls and larger than life lifestyles that will never feel like home to me. Maybe we are just never happy with what we’ve got; maybe it is just another stage of growing up. Maybe it’s just that human desire to fit in somewhere you belong.

Impluse always was my friend. Wasn’t it the reason I’m sitting here in this strange town in the first place? I take my cd out of my stereo, the melancholy sense of nostalgia is gone. I put the cd back in the wallet, and I put the wallet back in the box I have just begun to unpack. I will not unpack it anymore. These things, these important things, they will stay with me. They will stay with me now, on my return.