Last night was the second in a row where I had dreams filled with a group of people I haven’t seen for a long time - with the exception of one, who I had the good fortune to see over Christmas, it’s a period of years. The dreams were largely incoherent (most of my dreams were), but they were mostly defined by feeling rather than memory.
I have a weird relationship with nostalgia - weird, particularly, because my past largely mirrors that of my best friend, and we’ve dealt with it in different ways. For the last ten years or so, with minor and major deviations here and there, our social lives have been very similar. We’ve gained and lost the same friends at roughly similar times, drifted apart from people, got closer, and so on. Joe claims to not remember most of this, even though things will obviously surface every now and then - for a long time, he fought a host of embarrassing memories with alcohol. I didn’t - not really, anyway. There are events from two, four, seven years ago that I can remember with startling clarity, and being in the town where they were first formed has a way of throwing them up more often.
My regrets - and I have a lot of them - aren’t as simple as just wishing I’d done something differently. It was acting like a fucking asshole after my first breakup, and the subsequent realisation that I had been one, that made me more considered with the things I say, taught me to empathise better with others (rather than just imagining myself in their position), and made me a lot better at learning to say sorry. It was an uncomfortable severance with a couple of other people I considered close friends which taught me that you can’t have friendships founded on mutual mockery, because when either of you crosses a line everything breaks down. It was irreperably drifting apart from dozens of people that taught me the value of holding onto the things you have.
These are all lessons I’m not sure I would have learned otherwise. I can’t say with authority that I wouldn’t, or that there weren’t ways I could have learned this stuff without a serious amount of collateral damage, but they’ve nevertheless shaped me - I’m a better person now because I’ve already fucked up, and I’ll continue getting better because I still fuck up now. That, by itself, is a pretty big lesson.
When I consider regrets like these, though, it gives my memories this strange, sad-but-not-crushed feeling. Every consideration of the good moments - and, provided I have a level head, I can remember more good moments than bad - brings with it a little sadness that the moments with those people are over for good, while happy that those moments exist to begin with. Every time I think about the bad moments, I’m sad that people got hurt (sometimes me, sometimes not), but happy that I learned from my mistakes.
Every step in this place is another memory. I live in a suburb of Stockport that feels a little like a gated community without the gates. There are roads I have walked along thousands of times. Both of the schools I went to have changed in appearance since I left, and my sixth-form college was demolished to make way for a new building, but walking past them still throws up a barrage of memories.
The cute girls (and, in one case, boy) that I barely even spoke to because I was too shy. Conversations on the way home from school that wouldn’t just end when we went our separate ways, instead lingering for minutes and sometimes hours. Little gatherings at people’s houses, days in the park, making younger kids laugh (or run away) by being repeatedly ridiculous.
This is the only place that I’ve ever lived as a kid, and in twenty-one years the environment’s barely changed. A few houses were built where there used to be an abandoned garage. The occasional hall or block of apartments was restored or levelled. But the cinema where I saw my first film and later worked hasn’t changed. The library was refurbished, but looks identical from the outside. When I walk around this place, my mind keeps lighting up.