Nostalgia is Weird
I recently visited my parents in my hometown, and it made me very melancholy. I was homesick. I was nostalgic in its most literal etymological sense: "the pain associated with returning home."
I had come back to the place where I was raised. I saw the schools I had gone to as a child, I visited my childhood church. I met some of my childhood friends. I drove by my childhood home. But none of them were as I remembered them. All of them had changed. They were subtly unfamiliar in a million different ways.
There is something paradoxical about yearning for one's childhood. Children rarely want to be children. My niece and nephew want to grow up and be adults, I certainly did when I was their age. When I was eight, I had to put up with my parents' arbitrary whims. And I had to spend eight hours a day in Child Prison. I hated Child Prison much more than college or any of my adult jobs. I could hardly wait to live on my own and drive and have my own money.
But, perhaps, it isn't so odd. I don't really want to be a child again. I want to visit places which were once dear to me, to dwell on media which I loved, to visit my childhood home. To maintain relationships with people who have changed or died. I do not yearn for these things because I experienced them as a kid. I yearn for them because they once mattered to me, and cannot go back to them. I can never return to my childhood home, I can never go back to my grandparents' farm. I will never again play with my childhood friends.
When I drive by my childhood home, now overgrown and uninhabited, I am not melancholy because I'm not a child anymore. I'm melancholy because things have changed, and I don't like change. I yearn for stability, but all is flux. I sense the impermanence of all worldly things, and that is the cause of my sadness.