Pools of light and ache

I know many many people are into nostalgia. They seem to love it as much as it depresses me and until today I had a hard time understanding that.

One of the things I thought was wrong with my maternal grandma was her lack of attachment to things my mother and other people found hugely important like antiques and things kept purely for sentimental value despite how you feel about them now. I think I feel much the same way she might have.

To me the past is dark, highlighted in pools of yellow incandescent light. Melancholy permeates the atmosphere as I remember both the good and the bad things about it.

When you hear a song from the sixties perhaps you think boys and parties and swinging down the lane in an old Dodge with the radio blaring while you eat M&Ms. I do too, but I also remember that vast sense of not belonging, of being mostly at sea with my feelings and thoughts and the ache I had for what I thought was supposed to be.

The same goes for my marriage in the seventies. Dark wood and macramé, friends and siblings still using drugs and alcohol to medicate themselves, and the nagging sense that something was not quite right with my marriage. Pools of light and ache.

Then came the eighties and the closest I ever get to pleasant nostalgia. My children lit up my life more than anything I've ever known before or since, but along with that came the terror of feeling I had to protect them from the monsters in the world. blinding love over a crater of darkness.

I have discovered that there are people so full of themselves there is no room in their lives for anyone else, except as receptacles who provide a repository for what they need from them. They carry the darkness like a lantern that drives me away.

To me, nostalgia is a lopsided remembering of something that wasn't as good as it seems in retrospect. It may be your candle on the water, but I am content to stay right here in the light of the present.