Dreams, I have been having dreams filled with people and things I don’t want to think about. The problem is not that they are bad dreams, quite the contrary, the dreams are so beautiful they hurt to have.

The thing that comes to mind is the idea of nostalgia, what I remember is a small speech from the show Madmen talking about its meaning.  It’s explained that it means a pain of an old wound. It is the combination of the two ancient Greek words meaning pain and homecoming. It was a description originally used to explain the feelings of Swiss mercenaries fighting away from home.  It’s a sense of melancholy that I can’t escape.

This pain that I’ve gotten used to, a hurt that will go away as long as I don’t think about it but I can’t help but think about it. The wound is in my heart because it just wants to go home.  I have lost the home for my heart; I had given my heart away and when it was returned to me it was a foreign object.  It didn’t fit; it was treated warmly, but I didn’t know how to handle own heart. So it yearns for that, the cozy, comfortable space in which it grew.

My heart and I are attempting to understand each other.  We were apart for so long that we know that we have to spend some time together. I get familiar with what my heart wants and needs; the problem is the memories engraved on my heart.  The memories repeat the experiences of when it was treated well, when it was happy, when it was hurt, and when it was sad.  Like a record replaying over and over growing increasingly quiet as time goes on.

It’s the great unraveling of things, the desensitization of spirit.  The memory that begins as a situation and starts to turn into a story.  It hurts because of the memories and feelings of being so close for so long will eventually become nothing more than words.  The great human experience calls for us to keep moving forward if we want to survive and thrive.   So the memories will fade, and so will the pain. But it’s this feeling of nostalgia that allows me a glimpse of the experience, and is all that is left, but I know that too will erode with time becoming a memory of memory.

My mind and my heart are having a hard time with that; I can honestly say that it’s a pain that means something to me.  My heart is telling me its time to heal, telling me to wait until I am ready, it’s emptying out it contents, pain and all.

The pang of nostalgia.  I can’t get away from it, and the best thing to do is to have the feeling. Each one an echo of its former self.   Sometimes I want to deny the pain, the hurt so that the memory and feeling will linger a little bit longer, but I know that I have to let go. One day it will be gone, and my heart will be filled with other memories, but until then all I have are my dreams that are so beautiful they hurt.