Meta-Nostalgia

Invasion of a nauseous outpouring of self-expression from the distant past: I pull up the unrecognized document in the folder, only to be lambasted by a quick scribble of a soul-aching creation from years ago. And suddenly I’m back there, realizing where the pain will take me, namely here, where I sit reading this ancient plea for comfort, thankful that empathy implies externality. Thankful that I’m not there; thankful yet again that if I were, I could do it better.

And that is just it—that pain, the release, and yet the irony of cathartic nostalgia! Worry, worry, worry—I worried my time away on that lonely trip, worried moreover and the most that I wouldn’t take hold of the pain, that I wouldn’t use that depth of discomfort diagnostically, self-realization, growth, beauty, creation, art, depth, God. There’s a lately-born release to it now, to look back on that act of creation squeezed from my weeping soul, and to see the dynamic, then-invisible wonder of it all, the predictive glance turned backward to assure that self that I would get…here.

And yet now, as these hands come out of hiding in adultish comfort to renew the tapped-out pact with keys and screen, as these fingers dance to the rhythm of inwardness once more, and I make this absurd little attempt at creativity—which nevertheless is born in another realm as the resplendent experience of meaning—I come to realize, in stuttering non-response, that more legitimate than the fear of not harnessing one’s pain—is not feeling it.