Nostalgia.

Nostalgia : /nɒst'ældʒə/ : An affectionate feeling you have for the past, especially for a particularly happy time.

Do you ever feel nostalgic? If I'm honest, I feel nostalgic all of the time. Looking through photos, hearing a song that reminds me of a time in the past, thinking about memories I have from when we were younger and remembering how fun, easy, simple and enjoyable life was then with no worries in the world. Not that life isn't good now, because it is, there are just a lot of problems and worries to deal with now.

For the party, my friends asked my to get some photos from when I was a baby till now and all the time in between so that we could stick them up in the room for people to look at and see how far we'd come over the years.

I was looking through photos - my Dad bought down 3 or 4 huge boxes packed with packets of photos and photo albums and portaits we'd had done. There were thousands of them, so I was just picking out random ones and hoping for the best. I came across a packet of photos from the mid 90s of one of my brothers' birthdays and I saw a couple of pictures of two boys that we used to be really good friends with and the one closer to my age I haven't seen in at least 5 years, more like 8 or 10 years. They live quite a while away so we didn't get to see them that often but when we did see them we got on really well.

Isn't it strange that you can be so close with someone and then drift apart through no fault of your own? Well you can imagine, if it was more like 10 years, that we have both changed a considerable amount. I looked online and found him. If it hadn't have been for finding and speaking to his brother first, I would never have found him because I didn't recognise him at all. We've been talking over the past couple of days and I'm really happy to be reacquainted with him! It's wonderful.

But as always, I'm going to get my hopes up to have them crash around me, whether it be today, tomorrow, next week or in two months. It's never going to happen. Never. But even if it did... He's moving to Prague in two months. Prague. So making friends and stuff now is going to end with me being down one way of another.

I've really missed them both actually. I often thought about them, without anything in particular triggering it off. Childhood friends. Ones that I'll definitely never forget. The beauty of networking now! You can stay in touch with everyone. But I think it's so nice to see or speak to someone that you haven't spoken to in years. It's refreshing and it gives me hope.

He asked to see the photos so I've found them again, along with a few others. There aren't many. But "will speak tomorrow" surely means that he'll speak to me tomorrow, not just that he'll speak in general because he doesn't need to tell me that as it's fairly normal for 99% of people! And he didn't. It's the day after tomorrow and I highly doubt we'll speak today too. Or tomorrow. Maybe the day after that?

Stupid hope!

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