nos·tal·gi·a (nŏ-stăljə, nə-)
n.
1. A bittersweet longing for things, persons, or situations of the past.
2. The condition of being homesick; homesickness.
[Greek nostos, a return home.] [Greek, from algos, pain.]

All it takes is a picture, a smell, or a sound. We remember some past time and place, and a hollow feeling we can’t quite identify settles in our gut. Inexorable time prevents us from ever returning, but something keeps pulling us back and making us long for things forever gone.

Our souls ache to return to when life was simple, easy, joyful. We look back at our youth and see innocence and promise. Choices, both good and bad, have taken us on paths we would never have expected or chosen. We wish we could return, but the journey of life has moved us beyond the privilege.

And both [roads] that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
~Excerpt from “The Road Not Taken”

The young man I see in faded photos was once me, but now, years or decades later, I have so thoroughly changed that we might as well be different people. If I could only travel back and plead with him to not make the mistakes I know he will in the coming years. But I can’t, and so an impassable chasm keeps me on this side of time and he on the other. He will meet me eventually, but by then it will be too late.

Those who shaped our lives are taken from us. Grandparents, parents, cousins, and friends leave and change, carrying with them some part of what made us who we are. We wish we could reclaim what we once had, to have one more conversation, a few more hours spent together, but death or life has snatched them from us forever.

The places we remember are no longer the same. The woods where I spent untold hours exploring, the wild lake my family visited for several summers, the basement of my grandparents’ old house, are all changed. We like to convince ourselves that even though time passes, we and the world don’t change, but revisiting childhood haunts and sifting through boxes of old pictures quickly disabuses us of that fantasy. Even in the short space of my life so far, rivers have changed their courses, trees have sprouted up, and nature has begun reclaiming the paths and trails that twisted through the landscape of my childhood. I know I can never return, but I still long to recapture some of the innocence and thrill of adventure that still faintly echoes in my soul.

Every summer, I reflect on a time that is now over a decade past. It was only one month out of the over four hundred I’ve spent on this planet, but each year my heart aches to return to the mountains to feel the sun and wind on my skin, smell the sharp tang of pines, and see the vastness of wilderness. Could I return? Yes, but the places have changed and I have changed. No matter how I chase after the halcyon days of my youth or try to drag them into the present, they have faded away.

Our memories are hazy reflections of the past. Time removes details, leaving us with impressions that may be true, but are often a shadow of what we wish was true. Difficult days, weeks, and years are often forgotten or appear indistinct, while moments of pleasure and triumph are vivid. The past we yearn to return to likely never existed quite like we think it did.