Social media
makes us nostalgic. The websites are expansive rooms filled with everyone we've
known over the years, existing in the present and in a time lock. We
perpetually run both backwards and forwards, each half in the opposite
direction, and then wonder why we never feel like a cohesive whole. Photos are
nostalgic by nature, by the act of harnessing time. We exist in pixels, colors
and frames. Photos offer an illusion of stasis, but even the images and
recollections alter with perspective. We just do what we can to hold on.
Nostalgia even
emerges from times that were terrible, because I miss not knowing. I miss the
unconstrained possibilities. Even if they weren't actually infinite and
everything followed its inherent course, I miss having no idea what would happen
while holding endless ideas of what could.
At 4 a.m., or on
Facebook, or alone with the quiet and impassive reality of time, I greet my
sadness. It always lingers in the periphery, but now there are no distractions.
It's late at night and I can see it reflected back in every letter and pixel
onscreen. The clock carries weight in each tick. I need that grief, because the
pit in which I can lose myself is the wellspring that sustains me. Compassion,
creativity and connection flow from its stream, which permeates everything that
matters. And so I embrace the paradox of an ache that can consume me but also
fuels my inspiration, and the paradox of a website that links us to each other
but divides us from ourselves.
No one is fully
cohesive. We're spread out in words and pictures and ambitions and memories,
dispersed into each other and scattered through time. Being bound to a million
different places may not always feel freeing, but in a way, it also makes us
limitless. We can choose where we want to be.
