Nostalgia

10.15.25

I feel nostalgic today. I’ve been trying to convince myself it’s not self-pity, but even if there’s a pinch of that mixed in, I think I need to let it be. Sit in it. Absorb it. I miss moments of time from the past. Times I can’t go back to, and I’m okay with that, but I still miss them.

There’s a kind of ache in remembering. I hurt people I love and made their lives difficult at times, but there were also so many good times. I miss the good times. I think of my daughter growing up, and those memories fill my heart with warmth and love. Watching her change through the years feels like flipping through a photo album that’s alive. A photo album that still laughs and moves and drives away waving.

I know my upcoming birthday is bothering me. It feels like a definitive mile marker of halfway through my life. Which is literally fucking insane. I don’t know when I’ll die, so how can I call this a halfway point? I tell myself that, have entire conversations about it, and yet somehow, I’ve set my mind that forty-five is the halfway mark and no one can convince me otherwise. I have the next three months to obsess about this.

Today, I drove by Haunted World and smiled. I remembered all the stages—when Kendall was too scared to go without me, when she wanted me there but “just in case,” then when she didn’t want anyone to see me, and finally when she drove herself with her friends. Those are the memories I miss. Those tiny, seemingly insignificant moments that make up a whole life.

Maybe nostalgia isn’t about wanting to go back. Maybe it’s just love, remembering itself. And maybe this feeling of heaviness, the ache, is awareness. Awareness of everything I’ve lived through, everything that’s changed, everything I’ve lost and everything I still get to have. It’s the weight of being present enough to feel it all instead of pushing it away. Maybe this is what being an adult actually looks like. Not being untouched by the past but letting it touch me and still choosing to be in the present.