Heaven's Not Enough
Nostalgia seems to be a common theme for me nowadays. A deep-seated yearning for days gone by that I know I can never recapture. It’s a sobering thought, and not one that I particularly like to experience. I look back at everything that has happened to me, and the brief flashes of colour, smells, emotions and words all flicker past my conciousness. I think I miss the feeling of everything being new, of always being in a different place that I’ve never been in before. It’s a liberating feeling when you’re young, but one that you can’t tangibly recognise as everything is so malliable in your head; once it sets and solidifies, that liberation gives way to the dread of new experiences and new places, the so called “comfort zone”. I rarely go places I haven’t been before nowadays, everything is old hat and stagnant, and I wonder sometimes whether this is what growing older is. Is this the common ache of my generation, is it something that everybody looses at one time or another, but don’t vocalise?
I think of what I have, what I’ve achieved; carving out my small niche in the world, the warm little centre of the world. Is this the life that I want though? More and more I get the feeling that I want to utterly disgrace myself, to fall from my self-imposed grace until everyone around me despises me. I think only then could I sever all ties and drift to a new reality. My self contained little cosmos is what I have at the moment, my routine, my clothing and everything that makes up this routine I feel is my constriction, my cage. I look back at what I’ve just written, and I can’t remember crystalising my thoughts like this, I’m in free-flow, from brain to fingertips.
It’s been a common theme of my latest entries of this idea of growing old. I know a lot of people only get these feelings on birthdays, as if somehow marking years from your birth illuminates some far forgotten memory of how things used to be.
I read catalogues at work now, and see MDF Mouldings called things like “Toro” and “Osiris”, as if they’re some sort of talking point at a dinner party. “Yes these Mouldings are from the Toro collection, MDF no less.” Is this what people do? The unreality of the situation is astounding, it brought me up and slapped me in the face that this could one day be me. Drifting through a haze that used to be myself.
I have no fear of the inevitable, only fear in what I think I can’t change.
