to speak briefly of nostalgia

I have a complicated relationship with nostalgia.

On the one hand, it is illuminating to relive the sometimes bitter, oft-times sweet slivers of time that linger in my memory...the moments that come back unbidden as the result of a glance at a photograph or when a certain song plays or when a something in the now echoes something you did or said (or wanted to do or say) in a long forgotten then. A song will be remembered in a specific context and with a specific companion...an untold secret will be remembered...a kiss will be re-tasted; a tear will be re-lived...or a dream, a fear, a touch, a curse, a dance, or a regret; a smile, a laugh, or a whisper that went directly to my heart and took up permanent residence there...or a shiver of absolute communion in the afterglow of shared orgasm...and the past, in that glorious,lingering instant, informs all that I am.

That said, I've found...for better or for ill...that the past is more often than not best left relegated to those quiet halls of memory where it does...and should...linger as golden or as darkly as it needs to be in order to inform my perception of who I am, who I think I am, who I will be, who I thought I was going to be, who I was, and who I thought I was.

I glance at photographs...faces still and ever a part of my life, faces and places gone from the everyday happenstance of living but a part of me then as now. And, of course and especially, the instants of my own journey...people I know and love, people I knew and loved (or thought I loved...or wanted to love...), people gone from my life (taken by the inevitable march of time and circumstance...or by the end of the brief, wondrous, bittersweet eternity that our lives were supposed to be entwined during our respective journeys towards the light.)

I hear music...that song or that turn of a phrase...and it harkens back to friends and lovers and to places I can never return to...to the phases of my long-gone youth consciously and unconsciously edited to fit the myths of my own existence...and I linger in the moment.

And then I look forward...I look to the now...the past is prologue and the future is yet unwritten...and I...I have a complicated relationship with nostalgia...