My Nostalgic Heart

How do you like being back? What do you think being home? Are you looking forward to heading back to Boston? These are all several combinations of the same thing that are frequently asked of me whenever I return.

I have had a couple of conversations with a couple of different people here about what it is like to be home, one of my favorite responses or descriptions was what my friend Coreen said: “It’s like I imagined the whole thing.” Which we laughed about, but in a way it’s pretty true. Towards the end of the semester I couldn’t wait to get back to Cleveland, mainly because I missed my friends and family but I also had this idea that everything would be just how I left it. I guess it still is. Home doesn’t really change, but it’s not exactly the same either. It’s just this place where you go and your past is washed over you, at least that’s how it is for me. Everywhere I go, I can easily think of a memory I have there, and unfortunately for me half of those memories are with someone who as of a year ago, I have broken up with. Oh how nostalgia tugs on my heart strings – corny but true. I thought with time things of that nature got easier?

I read a couple of good quotes about nostalgia in Love In the Time of Cholera which I’ll conclude with:

“He was still too young to know that the heart’s memory eliminates the bad and magnifies the good, and that thanks to this artifice we manage to endure the burden of the past.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

That’s definitely true to my heart, for whatever reason I have a hard time remembering the bad times. Am I still too young to realize this?

“… only then did he understand to what extent he had been an easy victim to the charitable deceptions of nostalgia.” – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Nostalgia, so it seems, has an imagination of its own.

This entry was posted on December 28, 2007 at December 28, 2007 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.