23 April 2012
The orange glow of the street lights bathes everything with an ochre hue, casting an ethereal spell over the roads late at night.
I love driving at this time of the night, when the roads and highways are almost devoid of life, where cruising in the dreamy, other-worldly atmosphere takes me back to a nostalgic past. I remember as a young child lying in the back of the car watching street lamp after street lamp speed past my vision, enjoying the vantage point of gazing into the endless and limitless blackness beyond the orange glows and occasional trees.
The radio plays songs from the early nineties and late eighties and I remember a time when life was simpler and the burden of the world an unfamiliar notion to my childish, unformed mind.
I drive down the seemingly-endless road, and it feels surreal. Here I am, at twenty-four, away from home seven years now, eking out yet another fresh life for myself in my third city.
I drive in the ethereal, orange luminance and embrace the thrill of experiencing the unknown, that feels at once strange yet familiar. This is nostalgia; it fills your heart with an ache, and you yearn in vain for the past in the midst of new, unfamiliar surroundings. This is wistful reminiscence, a form of homesickness manifesting itself once again as nostalgia.
Nostalgia • Opuss № I