Nostalgia

I used to think of nostalgia

as powdered sugar lingering

like a bite of Grandma's Christmas cookies,

a sweet, ephemeral thing,

or like a ripple on a still lake

bursting forth from a stone thrown casually.

But as time passes,

I have come to find

that nostalgia is neither sweet nor a feeling sublime.

Nostalgia is a bitter kind of grief,

No, it's the worst, I think,

as there is no relief.

A scent in the air,

a scene half-remembered,

a dull ache in the skin that never recedes,

like the emptiness at the end of a breath.

Nostalgia is a curse of the heart,

filling it with shadows as the world grows dark.

The smiles of friends whose names you once knew,

the places you once traveled now with gates sealed shut.

I wonder, endlessly, if things will be as they were ever again.