If life doesn't kill me nostalgia will

He sits in the corner of the heart, like a shadow that never leaves its owner. He comes uninvited, in sudden moments of silence, amidst the hustle of work and the noise of life. He is not a passing guest, but a permanent tenant in the apartment of memory, paying his rent with hidden tears and sorrowful smiles. He needs no words; his eyes know everything in the heart before its owner does.

In the early morning, when the world is still asleep, it comes softly like a dry leaf. It wakes me with a scent whose source I did not know, then it becomes clear that it is my mother’s old perfume, or the smell of the earth after rain in our small village. It places its hand on my shoulder and sits with me, we look together at the ribbon of memories that displays itself without consent.

There, in the corner of the screen, my childhood appears like a silent film: my grandmother knitting under the dim lamp light, the sound of the old radio playing songs whose lyrics I no longer remember, our childhood screams as we played in the narrow alley that has now become a legend.

But nostalgia is not one thing. It has many faces, like The Days of Our Lives. There is the gentle kind that comes like a butterfly, then disappears, leaving behind a vague feeling of warmth. It is a longing for the little things: the first cup of tea in the morning, the sound of birds at the window, a glance of love from someone we no longer know where they are now.

Then there is the heavy kind of nostalgia, the one that falls like a rock into the lake of memory, stirring everything that had settled at the bottom. It is a longing for what never happened — for the dreams that died before they were born, for the love we never dared to confess, for the self we could have become had we taken a different path at some crossroads. This painful nostalgia asks us, “What if?” and then leaves us to drown in a sea of possibilities we will never know.

Memory is a betrayal wrapped in silk. We open the dusty drawers of the past to find fragments of ourselves, each piece resembling us, yet not quite belonging to us. Letters in a handwriting we barely recognize, photos with faces that look like ours but with eyes carrying an innocence we’ve lost, and trivial things that time has turned into precious relics. We ask in wonder: Is that really me? Or is memory deceiving us the way a magician fools the viewer’s eye?

But the cruelest part is that beautiful memories, over time, become like those drawings we made in childhood; we look at them now and can barely recognize the random lines that once seemed to us a masterpiece. We laugh at our naivety, but deep inside, we long for those innocent eyes that once saw the world with such wonder. Memory betrays us when it shows us how happy we were without knowing, and when it reminds us that we didn’t realize those fleeting moments would one day become our greatest treasure.

Nostalgia is the most honest and cruel mirror of existence. It reflects not only what we once were, but everything we lost along the way: the innocence that melted like snow on a cold winter day, the dreams we abandoned in the name of maturity, and the many versions of ourselves we buried in the graveyards of “what if.” We do not miss the days themselves, but rather the part of us that believed everything was possible, the part that had not yet realized that life is nothing but a quiet series of concessions.

And so, we become strangers to ourselves over time. Inside, we carry a whole museum of memories, each piece whispering: “This was you.” But when we reach out to touch, we find ourselves unable to recognize the characters that once lived in our bodies. The present passes like a dream, the future feels like a dream, while the past — that familiar stranger — becomes the only homeland we can no longer return to.

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