jaybb3rw0cky
Bitter sweet melancholy is the perfect undertone for it - it’s weird, huh? I often reminisce and it’s a combination of longing, chances gone, friendships lost, friendships forged, love (and hate), and so much more. I wonder why we gravitate towards those types of memories so often. And yeah, I’m like you bud, been thinking a lot like that these days. Hence why I dug up the old nostalgia box.
OOof… I feel this to some extent. When I kicked myself out of home I didn’t pack a whole lot. This stuff thankfully was from my late teens when I was already living on my own so I’ve been able to carry it around with me from share house to sharehouse. But some of the stuff I had left behind when I moved out? Not quite an unopened PSOne (holy hell that hurts to hear! I’m so sorry for your loss) but a bunch of really cool toys I wish I had kept.
And now, you’re right - a lot of memories are kept digitally. I should digitise some of this stuff since if it ever went up in smoke that’s it. There’s no recovery for that.
Lol - I know, right! But then I feel like you’d need both sides of the story. Having only the ones I received and not the ones I sent, it’s a little hard to piece them together (especially when they’re not dated). But yeah… the majority of the ones I’ve kept were from what I call my “big ex”, when in reality we were only together for a short time, and it was a very one-sided relationship, and then I met my wife and we’ve been together for closing in on 20 years.
It was a time. That’s all I guess I can put it down to hahah.
True. There’s no chance of recapturing that moment at all. Only some weird simulacra (which, if pulled off right would create its own moment). But gods! To go back to some of those exact moments. Even the painful ones that, so many years removed seem somewhat trivial yet the scars are still there.
What’s interesting is that it’s a box of stuff from before I was married, and yet I’ve still managed to add things over time from when my wife and I were together. Old student cards and metcards with notes written on them and cheap bracelets… So even if the box itself was a time capsule of a personal bygone era, there’s been a time leak? It’s kind of cool.
It would be so much easier if it was just simple accepted that this happens… that’s the one thing that I hold out for is that we’ll eventually get to a point in our culture where we no longer actually have to explain ourselves. Thankfully we’re moving but it’s at a remarkably slow rate, at least slow enough that it feels at times to have stagnated somehow backwards.
I wish this kind of ill feeling was better supported
I do wonder whether we’ll get to that point. I hope we do. And I wonder whether we’ll see advancements enough where we can point to something and say “see, this is what’s wrong with me right now”. Having something like a sprained ankle or infection is easy - they’re visible signs of why we’re not physically able to do something. But if there was like a… I don’t know… some kind of test that showed a serotonin imbalance (for example), you know?
Just perused a bunch of old letters - and I mean like, 20+ years, from when I was in high school. From friends that I no longer speak with. I distinctly remember the giddy feeling of getting mail back then. Found a learner’s permit from someone that meant a HUGE amount to me, who gave me their Ls when they got their Ps.
I do have to wonder if they’ve kept my replies.
Or does it even matter? As fleeting as those moments were, they left a lasting impression on me. They shaped who I was to become. Maybe it’s the same for them, maybe it’s not.