Nostalgia

God, grant me…

Serenity, to accept the things I cannot change

Courage, to change the things I can, and

Wisdom, to know the difference.

🌷

Okay, let’s break it down.

Drag Path by Twenty One Pilots is my on-repeat song right now and it’s been a minute since I’ve had one.

Listening to a song - really listening - makes me feel like a teen again. Wistful, somehow, but not missing the Florida nights in that home where I was so alone.

Did I have a happy childhood?

YES, in many moments.

I was a happy kid.

Beaming sunlit energy.

Also, though, conditioned to be - to see the “brighter” side of things - at the expense of sharing all of me.

Pieces put to shame, hiding, never “fitting in”.

More solace found in nature than in my own skin, at times.

Deeply sentimental, deeply nostalgic, when I turned 4, I cried that I wasn’t 3 anymore. Always looking out windows, always looking in my imagination, nose buried in a book, feet buried in the Earth, fairies & trees my confidantes.

always esoteric. I found spirits in everything.

still do.

a poet, a writer, a dancer from birth.

And now here I am.

I’m acutely aware in many moments that “this time has passed” - this moment will never happen again. This one, right now, my arms around you, feeling our breath. Someday you’ll be old & I’ll be too and the next neither of us will be here.

I was reminded of the movie It’s a Wonderful Life the other day, all black and white, and how my mom wants to watch it every Christmas. An imprint from her family traditions, from how she grew up, something passed on, something precious.

And I grew so, so, sentimental…this one moment & meaning to this one family which will never exist again. Which changes, constantly, already, all of us changing and shifting in each present moment. No one knows our story but us & someday no one will know it at all. but those imprints will still be passed on…the way someone eats pasta with spoons instead of forks or that song that finds its way through multiple generations. Maybe someday my children will watch It’s a Wonderful Life and that will have mattered for a moment longer. Little reminders of the people who once were.

What lasts? What’s etched in the surface? What will be left of you? Where do your footprints travel?

Far, far ahead of you in ways you could never anticipate - your existence is a ripple throughout time, stretching in a flat line from before you existed to after - and then a million sunburst rays in every direction. All of the humans, all of the places, all of the imprints, all of the voices that put you in this particular, peculiar place right now.

you’re all of it.

now,

then,

Always here,

and yet somehow, in each moment, never again.

…

..

.

PEACE LOVE XO SOPH

I love you.