I didn’t go camping much when I was 12. I don’t have sepia-hued memories of summer afternoons and life-altering trips. No halcyon days of careless joy.
I didn’t have a girlfriend when I was 16. No rosy recollections of first love among the daisies, No mythological ex. No unreasonable standards set to sour future relationships. When I finally got there I was naive, maybe, and young, certainly, but an adult.
I didn’t go clubbing when I was 20. Can’t name good old clubs that closed down, legendary parties that rocked the house, good old days when the booze was cheaper and the music better and the whole scene was alive and pulsing.

I am devoid of nostalgia. I have many memories, and many of them good. Girlfriends I’ve loved and parties that rocked and trips that I have to do again, as soon as possible. But I wouldn’t want to go back to any of them. I wouldn’t want to live in them anymore. Maybe because my social life, as such, started much later than the norm. Maybe

I am now 29, and around me I see people jaded and cynical and I want to shake them and yell at them to snap out of their late 90’s boyfriends and early 00’s parties and the friends from their last job and listening to the same old music and not reading anything new if at all and getting to be so much who they were and not who they are, and especially because they won’t live with me, here and now, and they make me a stranger in their past rather than a participant in their future. There’s too much future to waste on the past.