Nostalgia

It’s so easy to romanticise the past.

To put on rose tinted glasses and look at our nostalgia as though we can accurately re-name the chapters of our lives.

I remember all those balmy nights in the city, when the moon was hanging low above the terrace houses. The dilapidated signs and humming streets and the tired people standing outside the bars on the asphalt. I remember smoking cigarettes with our backs pressed against a wall and watching flowers fall from jacaranda trees.

These memories seem to gleam like the skyscrapers did in the distance.

They start to shape shift, and I end up forgetting how it felt to be alone surrounded by a million faces.

Always rushing. Always aiming to be somewhere. Always trying to start over.

Climbing ladders only to slip back down into the gutter with the scattered glass, and how it glinted beneath the street lights. How it became the stars on sleepless nights that left us feeling hopeless. Holding on to overcoats and dreams that we once had beneath a jet black sky, like neon signs left broken. We became nothing more than crosses etched on calendars to mark the passing time.

Yet I remember and it all begins to shine. As though hindsight can polish the sharpest pain into diamonds. As though the darkest days can be retold as if they all held nothing but the light.