Oh, the Nostalgia of it all

Every time I come back to my parents house I make it a ritual to go through all my childhood stuff. Not for any other purpose than to satiate my curiosity. I flip through old year books, read my journals and revel in the nostalgia of it all.

I had forgotten that I used to write a lot of poetry. Some of it was good, most of it awful and none of it am I going to post because it's all dreadfully embarrassing. Today I sorted through stacks of shuffled papers with prose scribbled on them, words I thought were so deep then and know they just make me laugh. I never wrote happy poetry either, it was all depressing stuff. And most of it was written after I had lost someone close to me, or after I was dumped.

So I was flipping through all these papers and found a stack of letters to myself. These letters I've written every three years since I was ten. On my birthday, I write to myself three years in the future. A time capsule of sorts recording my favourite outfits, my grades, boys I liked, advice for myself and what I thought I would be like when I opened up the letter. It's something I always looked forward to reading. It's humbling. Sometimes you forget what hopes you had for yourself in the future. Much of the information written I had forgotten about. Boys I hadn't thought about in years, outfits I wouldn't be seen in for a million, grades I will never see again (I was very studious in high school. Don't know what happened there.) These things were so important to me then. It's strange to think that I couldn't remember most of the things I wrote myself.

So does this mean that all the things I think are important now are going to be irrelevant three years down the road? Isn't that depressing. I suppose it's the whole lessons learned as you get older thing. Damned learning. It ruins everything we thought we knew.