A Brief History Of Nostalgia

Have you ever smelled nostalgia?

Not perfume.

Not memory sunk in jewellery.

A cold breeze at the edge of the nose.

The kind that carries ghosts

who still believe they mattered.

Vanity, fossilised.

Stories repeated so often

they forget they were once alive, 

pages drying into dust,

like leaves pretending they chose autumn.

Concrete. Mortar. Civilisation

slowly swallowed by moss and wild ferns.

Because the presence of life

has never been proof of progress.

Thirty summers ago,

nostalgia was introduced to me as inheritance.

Something sacred.

Something to defend.

Thirty autumns later,

it’s still nostalgia;

no new pages,

not even footnotes.

Just the same story

aged into reverence.

At what point does nostalgia

stop being memory

and start being archaeology?

At what point does living

become maintenance?

Loss, here, is hereditary.

It sleeps well.

Wakes late.

Outlives intention.

The future keeps arriving

like a delayed train —

always announced,

never present.

And the present?

Already filing itself

under “past.”

And yes it feels like thinking

for a brief moment in time, 

because it smells all so familiar,

and we were brought up 

to mistake familiarity for longing.

It's not.

It’s rot, 

aged carefully,

labelled heritage,

and handed down

with the mandate

to call it meaning.

And, that is the story of the city I come from, 

or as I call, a brief history of nostalgia.