I Recall

What might have been.

No other four words trickle more of nostalgia than those.

There is no substitute for satisfaction and it is within those transitions between conversations that we remember the time when the waves rose, higher than ever, charged with infinite possibility and the water paused. Right there time stood still and did not take apart that moment into little pieces of possible futures. And then.

The wave broke and the water screamed no more.

Every utopia to its watery grave. Every dream…drowned.

But this nostalgia of youth is fleeting and dies quickly. It does not resurface with an awesome superiority at the anticlimactic epilogue of our lives. Right now, only the rosy memories of youth chug away like old trains, garish and ugly in their present, only lovely in their antiquity.

We stare at old furniture and outside our homes; in the perfect of light it seems just…

Ideal.

Record Players, Old Radios, putrid cardboard of boxes boxing possessions from another time.

Everything smells the same.

Everything smells of yesterday.

Nostalgia.

Red Memories pinked and what men think they are disintegrates. Pink, the capital colour of feminity.

The smell of roses in a blocked nose.

And our idea the smell of petrol as charmed young boys.

Nostalgia could hold any colour in the world but it’s the most alien colour that it paints as its own skin.

For me, the machinist masochist masculinicist it is pink.

That old episode of Mystery Theatre, Khalid Anum’s moment of crowning glory, the horror and sadness that just seemed to occur almost like a wonder on screen.

“The Sea is a collector.”

I could not revisit it once more and it was almost ruined for me when I watched it again a few years ago. Thank God…for a dysfunctional memory.

Reality and perfect memories only dilute nostalgia.

The magic of nostalgia is that it creates fissures in memory, as if it were a force

Of nature.

Without entering a whole tangent of intangible unending definitory madness, Reality after all is just confrontation.

It is memory that defines reality.

And as memory begins to expire, the optimism buried within us resurrects itself and we look at the past and actually miss it.

If nostalgia is defined by an opposite, what is it?

If it needs an opposing force to have any capacity to incapacitate the hardnosed and the cold then what name or names can we give to that force?

Reality. Today. Tomorrow. The monotonous present. The uncertain future.

The ultimate horrific, tenterhooked on uncertainty, tomorrow world.

Depressing cynicism and heartbroken pessimism.

There is no single easily defined force.

Which means that if we were drunk on melancholy and nostalgia all the time, we’d be happier and better human beings. We were not as happy yesterday or will be as happy tomorrow as we will be reminiscing the yester-portraits and inhaling the scents of times long past.

All that stir and blur of hopeless, lost, locked and elusive headfilms.

They vaporise and flutter like pink butterflies in my insides.

Gloom doom, clean your fuckin room.

Would-be girlfriends and friends, curiosity with strangers…
ALL THAT
THAT
COULD’VE
been.

There is no regret.
No dissatisfaction with the present.
No ultimate nullifying disillusionment.
I’m only inhaling
and getting high
on my own
supply.

It’s not just that you can’t revisit the past outside your head.
The people, the things, the naiveté is lost.
You don’t have a telephone diary for all those unnamed names, no database to find it all again, and your heart’s a colder and more bitter place to foster your naïve self again.

It’s only a few more minutes before the writing gets tedious.
Reality makes more demands and nostalgia will have left, slamming the door behind herself, locking herself away and dissolve as if…
It had never been.
The only trace it left behind…
Memory.

“Memory cannot be defined. But it defines mankind.” – Ghost in the Shell.