Nostrangia


I think ‘nostalgia’ came about people tried to name the strange nausea that arises out of memories that stay. Hmmm, in that case it should have been nostrangia. Now this just sounds like anger coming through nostrils.

Oh well! Nostalgia it is then. A stale stagnant nausea caused by memories. I call it stale because the memories are old (obviously), and stagnant because the memory (the fact) doesn’t change. Or at least we think it doesn’t. Only God should know how gracefully we bent and polish and smoothen and manipulate each fact in our memory to suit our whims and fancies.

I have some memories of my very early childhood. When I say very early it is about that of 2 years. Now that is not possible isn’t it? Well it isn’t. I realized as I grew up that I have a brilliant imagination and that I can draw a picture of almost every word I say or hear1. Hence, I created my own memories.

But there are some memories I have that are clear and accurate. And they are so real sometimes it hurts they aren’t really real. When I feel these memories fading away, even the tiniest detail, I panic and decide to memorize every inch of the picture (or video) in my mind’s eye so that I never forget that is dear to me. My dear memories!

But sometimes I wonder if only I didn’t have memories. You know like the exponential distribution. There would be not joy from the past, no pain of the past, no regrets, no vengeance, no learning of course. We could just live in the present and hope for a good future. And we would not be afraid because we never knew what it is to be afraid. We probably would not be so happy either. But we’ll be curious, which is a nice feeling.

But what if we became like goldfish? Aimless, memoryless, wandering…

We’d be just ‘lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after, year. Running around the same old ground, what have we found?’

And if we had memories, we’d say ‘wish you were here’2

1. This is needs a lot of creativity since an oral version of anything will only describe the main segments. The background has to be carefully colored to add to the picture. And mind you, every single detail in perfect in my pictures, including the pattern on the sari of a woman say or the type of birds in the sky)

2. The post sprung out of the thoughts from listening to Wish You Were Here3. This song always strings up to my memories and descends sadness upon me reminding me of people I miss, many and various in stages.

3.4 I do not listen to this song often. My favorite will always be Coming Back to Life even though High Hopes competes with it fiercely.

4. Am I allowed to have a superscript to explain within an explanation of a superscript? (This one goes one more tab to the right than the previous one, like a C program very everything within one curly bracket is maintained a particular tab spacing before the start of the line5)

5. I should have never read The Curious Incident of The Dog in the Night-time. I picked up with digression from there. The book calls it digression. I call it voicing my flow of thought.

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