I Thought It Would Always Feel Like This

There’s a particular quality to time when I’m ten years old in the 90s. It moves like honey - thick, slow, eternal. Summer stretches on for decades. A school year is a geological epoch. The distance between now and next birthday might as well be infinity.

I’m sitting on the carpet in my best friend’s room at 1 AM, controller in hand, convinced that this - right here, right now - is what forever looks like. The glow of the TV. The sound of my friend laughing. The Legos scattered across the floor that we’ll build into spaceships tomorrow. My mom and dad at home. Everything feels exactly like it should.

I worry about small things. Getting through the next day at school. Avoiding the kids who make fun of me. Whether I’ll beat this level before I have to go home. These feel enormous. These feel like the only problems that exist.

I don’t know I’m in a bubble. I don’t know what privilege feels like when I’m breathing it like air. I don’t know that “peaceful” and “perfect” and “boring” are three words that will someday feel like a luxury I didn’t know I had.

I just think: it will always feel like this.

Fast forward a few decades. I’m in my forties now. I have two teenage boys who are living through their own version of that endless time, except it’s not the 90s anymore and their world doesn’t look like mine did. Life has delivered its curriculum - the kind I don’t get to skip. Job loss. Relationships that fractured. Trauma that lodged itself in my nervous system and set up camp.

I’m learning to listen to my body when it whispers warnings I used to ignore. I’m discovering I’m capable of things I never imagined. Like making music. Like this music.

And here’s the strange part: these synth waves, these retrofuture melodies - they don’t sound like anything I actually heard back then. But they feel like that time. Or maybe they feel like the memory of that time. Or maybe they feel like the version of that time that never quite existed but lives in my head more vividly than the real thing ever did.

That’s the trick of nostalgia. It’s not a photograph. It’s a painting. Everything’s a little softer, a little warmer, a little more golden than it actually was. The hard edges filed down. The boring parts edited out. What’s left is this ache - bittersweet and beautiful and impossible to hold onto.

I can’t go back. I wouldn’t even if I could - that boy is gone, and I’m not him anymore. But I can still feel him sometimes, when the synths hit just right. Still ten. Still sitting on that carpet. Still believing in forever.

Still holding on. Still letting go.

Both at once. Always.