on nostalgia

This week has been filled with joyous reminiscing giving birth to a sort of painful nostalgia. It all began Tuesday when I met up with my old friend Mandy Kimes. It was so great talking with her, catching up, and sitting outside the café with her took me back to the days in spring 2009 when we’d sit outside the Hilltop or go to coffee shops and sit and talk about life and God and everything in between. Those days feel distant now, old memories that are beginning to yellow with the stains of time. While it was only 2 years ago, so much has happened between then and now—I’ve moved three times, for instance, and have been through a myriad of good and bad life experiences—that it feels like a primitive age. Jessie came into town last night, and we sat up tonight late into the night talking about the old times when she was dating Kyle (who’s now married) and then Justin (who’s now engaged), and how I was absolutely head-over-heels for our Thai friend Faikham and then how I forget the Asian for Mandy Kimes (see the circle I made there?). All those times, all but forgotten and living on through a handful of disjointed connections that I hope to remain un-severed. And if those times feel cryptic, reliving my high school “glory days” with one of my oldest friends, Dewenter, and then it looks like I’m remembering someone else’s life, or giving commentary on events from which I’m disconnected, some casual—albeit satirical—observer. Even the more recent times, like the spring and summer of 2010, feel distant, separated from me by a widening and unbridgeable gulf. Hanging out with Dylan and Tyler on the front porch, smoking our cigarettes and drinking our beers, going on long walks at the park and making trips to my work for free drinks, and then we’d sit on the patio and smoke the clove cigarettes Dylan got from some friend in Turkey.

All of these are different chapters in my life, some longer than others, all of them different in their own respects. Being a narrative kind of guy (hell, I practically get off by writing stories), I tend to view my life in narrative form. A “new chapter” in my life must meet a certain set of criterion, either internally (in who I am as a person) or externally (how the story has changed with a set of circumstances). These chapters are almost always set apart by sudden external events, or internal interpretations of them, and some are funny and others are sad. All are entertaining once the cloud has lifted. I’ve begun a new chapter in my life and have been becoming wholly wrapped up in it. Moving down to Cincinnati, reconnecting with old friends, living in community with people I love, and being part of a well-known and reputable coffee shop (rated Best in Cincinnati 2010, might I add). With the dawn of each new chapter, the preceding chapter feels a bit more distant, and the memories of those days fade and contort as the distance lengthens and as my reflections on those events become integral to the fabric of the events themselves. Life is constantly in a state of change—“How Life Can Turn,” one of my favorite songs (Appleseed Cast, look ‘em up)—but at the same time, there’s no such thing as “starting afresh” and “starting anew”: all the preceding chapters have led to the new chapter, and even if that chapter is to be about “a new beginning”, it is that and only that because of all those chapters leading up to it. Even so, when it comes to my own life story (and everyone else’s story, for that matter), the advent of a “new chapter” isn’t a rejection of the old but, rather, a growth from it (be it positive or negative). As distant those days may seem, they are integral to who I am today and where I’m at today. Tweak any of those days in even minor ways, and what’s real now may never—and probably never would’ve—come to be.

So here’s to Starting Anew.

Or, at least, to Keeping It Going.