Wild Interrupted

i think about the friends that simply drifted too far, a love forever trapped in scents and photographs. there’s a romantic kind of melancholy in the way my hands run over the shapes of their names. it reminds me of the city i grew up in but don’t live in anymore— the streets, the landmarks, the houses that all look the same but no longer feel the same (because these things are as continually altered by time as we are). i miss them sometimes but the feeling doesn’t endure as much as i think i want it to. it was over the day we promised to see each other again.

(n.) a nostalgic longing to be near again to something or someone that is distant, or that has been loved and then lost; "the love that remains".

-Joyce Carol Oates, From "We Were The Mulvaneys" (Plume, 1997)

- Sigmund freud