I have been full of nostalgia lately.  Memories of the past ten years have been invading my mind with a vividness I hadn’t realized was still there.  I think about my days at Miami University and I can smell the coffee machine in the lobby of the building where all my early morning psychology classes were held.  (Can’t remember the building’s name, though.) I can feel the crisp air in the morning, the weight of my backback on my shoulders, and the dampness under my arms from having to run to avoid being late for my first class.  I can recall, with detail, a conversation I had with a graduate assistant sitting in front of a fireplace at a cabin over on Western campus.  I can feel the awkwardness of arriving at frat parties where I knew 1% of the people there.

I have no idea why these memories have come, or why they are progressing chronologically.  Last night, after reading about Porches in the Sun’s Readers Write section,  I was devastated to realize I could not remember a single detail about the porch in the intern apartment in Kalkaji, New Delhi where I lived for months. I laid in bed and squeezed my eyes shut, forcing the recall.  Eventually, the pervy neighbor who talked over the porch walls to all the cute interns came to mind.  Maybe somethings are best left forgotten.

Generally, I don’t feel regret, but rather nostalgia.  I miss the people who make cameos in those memories; especially those that are so far away – Diene’s family, old friends from college, the characters I met in India, my teenaged and early 20-something self.

I take solace in the fact that all of us, spanning time and space, can look up  in the night sky and see the same moon.  Its one of the few constants in the various frames of the filmstrip of past. I am grateful for it.