Today was the perfect type of day. A sunny day, but also a cool day. You can feel the chill against you, but you can also feel the heat of sunshine on your face, vanquishing it in an instant. Your body feels flush, luxuriant. It's a day soaked in youth.
It brings me back to the end of high school and the beginning of college. I was in shape and attractive enough that gay dudes would hit on me. I had the world ahead of me. I just had to get through the drudgery of school, and then the real world could begin. Get that backup job, but put everything I've got into writing. If I keep getting rejects, well, then, uh, fuck. I'm just not trying hard enough. So I tried harder. Always harder.
It's the kind of day that I would spend in the wilderness. I walked everywhere back in those days, never taking a ginger step because I had two perfectly good and healthy legs, all ten toes present and accounted for. I walked difficult trails at forest preserves for fun. If I was lucky I had a lady friend with me. It didn't happen often, but it did happen more frequently than my high school self would have thought. A cool and sunny day was a lot more fun when you had a warm hand in yours. Or even better if you found a particularly abandoned stretch of forest . . .
The leaves finally changed color and sacrificed their lives for my aesthetic enjoyment. There was a crunch in my step today as I made my way through the parking lot to get my last haircut until spring. As I walked back to the car I felt the cold breath of our mother on my freshly exposed neck, and I traveled in time once again to those days when the crunch of the leaves beneath your feet was fresh and new. Even though at the ripe old age of nineteen you're an old hand. A very old hand, indeed. I already knew the secrets of the world. What else could I possibly need to know?
Never aware that while innocence might be the winged cherub in midflight, experience is a Neanderthal with a big club. It always lurks in the shadows, waiting for the moment to beat some dark and terrible knowledge into you, something that eradicates some previously cherished piece of piece of you.
I came back home, and just as I was about to go back inside I turned back to the world and felt the warmth, the chill. The stuffy house behind me waited, old and decrepit while the sprightly new day danced in the glow of forgotten ecstasy newly discovered.
To quote a great man, "The world has moved on. O Discordia!"
Nostalgia twists the knife, and you feel an ugly disgust with your past self. That motherfucker'd better appreciate what he has. He has a lot more than he thinks. Knowing, having lived it, that the motherfucker in question did not appreciate what he had. He didn't until he started to lose those things. The second rule of Thermodynamics.
The grief for a world lost to time sinks its fangs in, and you suddenly hate the world around you. You want it to perish because goddammit, this can't be the way things are supposed to be. Nothing works, and everything is getting worse. My sacred world was destroyed to pave the way for this ghastly monstrosity?!?!?!?! And then the manifesto starts writing itself. What I would do if they put me in charge . . .
You can't let that happen. You just have to remember that this is the way of the universe. The kids living today will mourn these days when they are adults. And their kids will do the same, as will their kids and so on. The wheel turns. The pendulum swings. What goes around, comes around. We have so many clichés for this, I think, because we have ALL noticed this trend whether we admit to it or not, and we're trying to make a square peg fit in a round hole in our attempt to make sense of it all.
I went back inside, into the stuffy house and away from the youthful vigor of the day. I wanted to go out for a walk and cursed my bad foot, knowing that my days of even going around the block are over. To quote another great man, "So it goes."
There is one thing I'm truly grateful for: humanity's ability to remember so powerfully. It wasn't a thought or an image or a sound that sent me back in time. It was a *feeling* so perfect it can't ever be replicated by the machines we're desperately training for . . . what, exactly? But I could feel the world so strongly in myself that it overwhelmed me. For a moment while I was crossing the parking lot I saw an old Cadillac, and there was no one around looking at their phones. No other cars. No sounds from the present that would seem alien in the past, and I was there. 1999. A world far from perfect, but a world I at least found acceptable. I didn't feel torn apart by everything like I do today. My mind has never been a peaceful place, but there were times when it was a lot less of a storm. The waters were manageable.
But we have those memories, and we have ways to be teleported to them. And that is one of my favorite parts about being alive.
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