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The Living, Breathing Nostalgia Machine

When You Live for Your Glory Days, Inglorious Though They Were

Zach J. Payne
6 min readJun 13, 2018

There’s something about this time of year that makes me nostalgic and sad. People are graduating, people are moving on, and it’s a big celebration of life and progress and moving on to the next stage of life.

Or, in my case, it’s a reminder of how far I haven’t come.

It’s so easy for me to indulge in nostalgia. Too easy. Surf back through old photographs, all safe on Facebook. Many of those copied over from MySpace back in the day. Too easy to surf through the profile of people that I still call friends, but who really aren’t. They’re people who’ve moved on to bigger lives and better things, people that were a part of my life once, and that I still feel some kind of attachment to.

It’s almost like I’m living in some kind of temporal flux (sorry, I’ve been watching Star Trek: Voyager lately) where I’m simultaneously here, on July 12, 2018, writing this essay, but also in the Spring and Summer of 2009 — the year I graduated high school, the year that I had a big circle of people who called themselves my friends, the last year that I really felt like I belonged to a community of people my own age.

Now, this is purely rose-tinted bullshit.

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Zach J. Payne
Zach J. Payne

Written by Zach J. Payne

(He/They) Poet. Thespian. YA Novelist.

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