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Some Things Can’t Be Fixed
A Reminder for when nostalgia and regret strike.
The mood hit me today, as it hits me every once in a while. I’m sure it happens to you, too, where you start thinking about a person who used to be a part of your life.
Maybe it was your fault. Maybe it wasn’t. Or maybe, you’ve had enough time and distance to realize that fault and blame aren’t easy vectors to follow, to trace, to assign blame. Or maybe you admit it freely: you were the one who hauled the kerosene and blew that fucking bridge into the sky.
It doesn’t stop you from wanting to look back.
I don’t know whether it’s sadism or the annoyingly human trait of looking at the past with rose-colored glasses. Why do we, in the midst of our present struggles, look back, thinking the past was infinitely better?
Maybe it was objectively better. Or maybe it wasn’t. It doesn’t seem to matter. All that matters is that slip and swish of nostalgia, the memories of the good moments with that person, even if those moments were few and far in between: the hugs, the great sex, the kisses, the texts, the holding hands, the bonfires at Huntington Beach.
I don’t understand why that chemical mush-sponge inside our skulls insists on highlighting the good things. You’d think that, in conditioning us to…
