There are nostalgias that give life, and nostalgias that bring death; nostalgias that feed on flashing memories of joy and sadness; nostalgias that time cannot erase, and nostalgias that are fleeting and ephemeral. There are arcane and fugitive nostalgias that accompany every season of our lives, illuminating our path with their stellar glow and freeing us from the reefs of aridity upon which our tired and weary hearts so easily shipwreck.
We feel nostalgia for a loved one who is no longer here, whether distant or departed; we feel nostalgia for a home we have left behind, which, full of memories, continues to accompany us on our journey with its shadows and its glimmers, with swarms of emotions lost and sought in vain.
We feel nostalgia for music, for landscapes lived, for enchanted mountains that we continue to see in their motionless distance, no longer reachable, and for the high tides that devoured our gaze and immersed us in the silence and wonder of the heart.
We feel nostalgia for the places that saw our adolescence and youth flourish, along with our hopes; places that are lost, yet nevertheless continue to survive intact and luminous in a memory sometimes wounded by destiny. We feel nostalgia for lived experiences that once nourished our soul and have since withered, becoming embers that, though they never truly go out, can be mysteriously rekindled. We feel nostalgia for the lost homeland where we were born and lived, and from which we grew distant, because the hardest part of a goodbye is saying goodbye to ourselves.
I am grateful to all those who, by giving me their time, have granted me a life so rich that I can’t remember it all at once, I have to remember it in installments.
If on the train you sit the other way, with your head turned to what’s behind, you see less of life that’s coming, you see better the life that’s gone.
Portrait by @alexfree_hii
