The strangest nostalgia has set upon me for the past couple days. I’m not sure exactly when it began, but I feel it is either when my dad made a comment about me moving out next year or when something finally made me realize that I was going to miss high school. Memories of high school football games floated through my mind, along with fragments of debate trips and tennis tournaments. These memories opened floodgates of deeper memories – countless attempts to make my best friend my girlfriend; junior high trips to Houston and to Washington D.C.; playing and living baseball growing up.

As more memories flooded my mind, a drowning sensation engulfed me so that I fought to maintain awareness of past and present as the waves of nostalgia crashed over me, twisting my perception of reality. The supernatural seemed to join forces with nostalgia as my life wore a past semblance. Things that hadn’t happened in years happened. I sat on the couch watching t.v. without a computer and the temperature, the smells, and the emotions blended with my memory to form a portal into the past. Even now, as I sit alone typing this, the song in my head is a song from the past – ironically, “Somewhere In My Memory.”

I vividly remember close friends I made and lost – often the same – and long so badly not only to be with them again but to be with them in the same innocence that was then my life. The nostalgia moves my hands to create a playlist of past songs to listen to as I drift off to a sleep of memory. It seems that every crevice of my brain holds cherished treasures that have been locked up for years, and every discovery clutches at my heart, pleading for a door to reality.

How does this happen to me? I who was “born older.” I, the mature one. I, who have looked forward to college and independence since I understood what it meant. The dances, the football games, the debate tournaments, the tennis trips, the graduated friends, the graduating friends. Nostalgia washes onto the shore of my thoughts, bringing cherished pieces of the past, but leaves after a moment, returning to the sea of that which never again will be. The pain is so great because the memories are so cherished. What separates this past life from that of any fictional character? Neither is true at the present and neither will ever be. Yet the waves persist, and I can only hope to stay on the shore, watching the tide glide in, without being pulled back into the hopeless ocean of nostalgia.