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There's an old saying:
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“The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
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Anemoia.
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Looking at old photos, it's hard not to feel a kind of wanderlust
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—a pang of nostalgia, for times you've never experienced.
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To sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by.
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Who lived and died before any of us arrived here,
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who sleep in some of the same houses we do,
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who look up at the same moon,
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who breathe the same air,
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feel the same blood in their veins—
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and live in a completely different world.
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It's a world still covered in dust from the frontier.
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A world of adults, whose lives are hammered out by hand.
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A world of front porches,
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of fires to light in the evening,
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of conversations over a fence.
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You'd watch as they carry on with their lives,
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that seem so important.
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Even if their story has already been told,
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even if none of it risks turning out any other way but the way it happened.
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But they carry on anyway.
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The past is a foreign country, and we’re only tourists.
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We can't expect to understand the locals,
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or why they do what they do.
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We can only ask them to hold still,
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so we can capture a photo to take home with us.
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So we can sit for a few minutes in a world of black and white,
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with clean borders that protect us from the rush of time,
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like a tide pool just out of the reach of the waves,
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that lets you linger in the moment—
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so clear and still
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you can see your own reflection.
