I wrote about nostalgia for old lovers, and how I've felt it sometimes for what was good, what was bad, and what never really got off the ground. For those of us who love the 90s, I also wrote about a Nine Inch Nails song that meant a lot to me when I was younger. Here's an excerpt:
Another time, the “something I can never have” was an honest relationship with the girl I loved. I’ve written about her here several times before. We slept together, but I didn’t know how to be with her, not for real. She “made this all go away” in the sense that I wanted her with a sort of mind-erasing lust that I didn’t know was possible before her. After the first time we slept together, I wrote in my journal, “I had real sex last night, for the first time.” Then I tore the pages out of the book, ripped them carefully into tiny pieces, and buried them in the trash can under cat litter so they could never be found. With her, that sense of awakening and sense of shame were so deeply tied together that I still feel it now. I still have her picture. I still weep when I look at it. She had a birthmark on the side of her neck, and the studio that took the picture tried to airbrush it away as if it were some sort of blemish, and I fucking hate them for it. She had thick, curly hair that I loved intensely—so much that, recently, on the occasion of running my hands through another woman’s thick, curly hair, I shivered with recognition and longing for a person and a time long gone. I was cruel, sometimes, to the girl I loved, and that was both because I thought I couldn’t have her and a means by which I made it impossible to have what we could have had together.
You can read the whole post here.
