The concept for today’s issue came from a dream. To be precise, it was a few weeks ago when I had a very vivid edible-induced dream. You know in Inception, when Leo travels to limbo and time and space just seem endless? Or in Interstellar when they land on Miller’s planet and every hour is equal to seven years on earth? Yeah, this is the level of what that dream felt like. I was 13 years old again, re-experiencing pivotal moments as if they were in real-time. Moments I’d fleetingly revisited in my waking, adult life, torn wide open so that the fragments of these memories could be re-examined under a new adult lens. The whole thing was vivid, excruciatingly so, but there was also a strange sense of comfort in the moments I was rediscovering nearly twenty years later.
I’m someone who has always been predisposed to feelings of nostalgia, to the point where I’ve been nostalgic for people I’ve never met and places I’ve never been. In those moments, I feel as though I am part of something larger; it’s as if I’m connected to thousands of other people, and I have the ability to experience a fragment of their life in that exact moment. Whatever I feel, I imagine the lives of everyone else also feeling how I am at that point in time (if any of you have seen Sens8, then that will articulate what I mean better than I can explain it). Those close to me often joke about my emo tendencies, especially when it comes to my choice of music, books, or films (in particular, Henry likes to comment on the fact that I listen to songs that ‘are just wailing’ when I’m listening to someone like Mariana’s Trench, who are a band that defined my teen years). The word itself derives from the Greek words ‘nostos’ (to return home) and ‘algos’ (pain), so my inclination towards certain media genres seems to match my general disposition and habit of being lost in nostalgia. My dream reminded me of a period in my life where I felt everything so strongly. Love, heartbreak, anger, hope, confusion…everything that happened either felt like the end of the world or the start of something exciting and brand new. In particular, this dream reminded me of someone I hadn’t thought about for years, and this is where our story begins.
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