Longing

Longing …………

Why is it so hard to forget the past when we have the power to shape our future? All we seem to do is remember the childhood where we once felt pure joy…….a joy that slowly fades as we grow up. I wish we could stay children forever, untouched by the cruelty of the world.

Fiction has always been a way for us to escape from facing harsh realities, which is why so many find solace in it. After all, we’re all escaping from the burden of confronting ourselves.

Because facing ourselves means acknowledging the cracks we’ve tried so hard to plaster over. Fiction gives us worlds where mistakes are forgiven easily, where heroes rise no matter how many times they fall, and where love, though tested, always finds a way home.

In those imagined realms, we find pieces of who we were before life’s rough edges carved into us, the innocent laughter, the wild hopes, the unquestioning trust in happiness. It’s a comfort, a rebellion against the cynicism that adulthood often demands.

Yet even as we lose ourselves in stories, part of us aches for something real, not just to escape, but to heal. Maybe that’s why we cling to memories of childhood too; not because we wish to go back, but because we yearn to move forward without losing that light we once held so easily.

Maybe the real challenge is not in forgetting the past, but in learning how to carry it gently, without letting it weigh us down.

And so we drift, between memory and hope, between the ache of what was and the fragile beauty of what could be.
The past calls to us like an old, familiar song, one whose notes we cannot unlearn, no matter how far we travel.

It hums beneath our laughter, echoes through our silences, and sometimes, it even shapes the dreams we dare to dream.

Perhaps that is the quiet miracle of being human:
that even as the world wearies us, even as our hearts gather bruises, we still reach for wonder.

We still build futures out of broken pieces, still find magic tucked between the ordinary moments.

We still believe, against all odds, that somewhere, somehow, a part of that childhood joy can be woven into the lives we are yet to live.

And maybe that’s enough. Not to stay children forever, but to carry their fierce, shining spirit into the weary hands of adulthood.
To walk forward, not in forgetting, but in remembrance…..a softer, wiser kind of hope.

And so we move through life, caught between memory and possibility, between what was lost and what we still dare to find. The past is stitched into our very skin, humming beneath each breath we take, refusing to be forgotten……….and perhaps it shouldn’t be. Perhaps forgetting was never the goal. We carry it because it shaped us, because somewhere in those faded afternoons of laughter and sunlight, we first learned what it meant to feel alive.

Even as the years weigh heavier on our shoulders, even as the world teaches us the art of caution and the necessity of masks, a part of us still yearns…………not to return, but to remember. To remember how it felt to run without fear, to believe without proof, to dream without restraint. Fiction cradles that forgotten self, offering a mirror to the soul we tucked away in the name of growing up. It offers a thousand second chances, endless roads untaken, a comfort against the cold, hard truth that real life does not always wait for us to be ready.

But maybe that’s where our true power lies……not in discarding the past, but in learning to weave it into the fabric of who we are becoming.