"i am unfailingly nostalgic"

a little excerpt from my new favorite blog that i totally relate to: 

I am nostalgic to a fault, perhaps because of the way I grew up---always moving, always leaving, always idealizing the place I used to be before I left it---or perhaps because of something else entirely, a rogue strand of DNA that got mixed in at the last minute. I miss people before I've left them. I reminisce about things ten minutes after they've happened. I look back on times that were happy and they make me happy but they make me sad too, and sometimes there is just no way to separate the happy from the sad, and it's because you can't go backwards, I think, because there's no way to press the repeat button. Things happen and then they're over. People are here and then they're gone. We keep going forward because we have to, and the past recedes in the rearview mirror behind us, and it gets smaller and smaller and smaller.

You can't go home again, they say, and it's true, you can't: you can't go back in time.  You can't go back with hard-won knowledge and hard-earned skills, and you can't do it over, even if you swear you wouldn't do it any differently at all. You can't go backwards, and so you have to go forwards. But there's nothing wrong with looking over your shoulder every once in a while.

many days (today was a full of it, actually) i find myself feeling homesick.  but it's not true homesickness; i don't pine away for my childhood home in virginia, my favorite restaurants (i miss them, sure), or even my friends and family back in the states.  i find that i'm thinking about them all and just sort of wondering what's going on, what they're doing, what we'd be doing if i were there too. 

even though it may be too early, i've begun (over)thinking what i want to be doing a year from now.  do i want to still be here? in trieste? in italy? in europe? out of the united states? which in turn causes anticipatory nostalgia for where i am now.  i'm beginning to predict what i'll miss about this place that i've hardly gotten to know yet. 

i really need to calm down and live in the present (insert cliche quote about living in the present instead of planning for the future - apparently this is a repeated theme for me?). 


xx!