A few months ago I found an old photograph of myself at nineteen, standing outside a flat I no longer remember the address of, wearing a jacket I could not now tell you the colour of with any confidence. I looked at it for a long time, not because the person in it seemed unfamiliar, but because he seemed so familiar and so gone at once. He was not a stranger. He was something stranger than a stranger: a version of me I had simply stopped being, without ever deciding to.
The First Distance
We tend to think of change as something that happens to us in dramatic increments — a move, a marriage, a death, a diagnosis. And some change does arrive that way, loud and datable. But most of it doesn't. Most of it happens the way erosion happens: an opinion softened here, a habit dropped there, a friendship that quietly stopped being tended until one day you notice the garden is gone and you cannot say which week the weeds won.
I think this is why nostalgia is so disorienting. It isn't grief, exactly, because grief knows what it has lost. Nostalgia is stranger than that. It is the sensation of loss without an inventory. You feel the absence before you can name what's missing.
“There are things we lose so gradually that we only notice them when we try to remember who we were before they disappeared.”
What Changes
What changes, mostly, is what we're willing to argue about. At nineteen I would defend an opinion about a film for an hour past the point of usefulness, simply because I had one and it felt important that everyone know it. Now I find I have opinions I keep to myself not out of diplomacy but out of a kind of tiredness that I've decided to call wisdom, though I suspect it's simply attrition wearing a better coat.
This isn't decline. I want to be careful not to make this essay a lament, because it isn't one. Something is gained in every erosion — usually patience, occasionally humility, sometimes just the practical knowledge of which battles cost more than they're worth. But something is also, undeniably, put down and left behind on the path, and I think we owe it a kind of honesty rather than a eulogy.
What We Keep
The strange comfort is that some things don't erode at all. I still love the particular sound of rain against a window I'm not required to go out into. I still believe, as I did at nineteen, that most people are more afraid than they are unkind, and that most unkindness is fear wearing a disguise. Some convictions turn out to be load-bearing walls rather than furniture — you can rearrange almost everything else in the house before you'd think to touch them.
It is worth asking, every so often, which of your beliefs are furniture and which are walls. Not to test them, necessarily — just to know the difference, so that when something does eventually move, you're not surprised to find the roof still holding.
What We Lose
What we lose, I've come to think, is mostly access — not the thing itself, but our ability to fully re-enter the feeling of it. I can remember that I once found a particular kind of Tuesday afternoon unbearably exciting, the kind with nothing scheduled and nowhere to be, but I can no longer quite remember what that excitement felt like from the inside. The memory is intact. The feeling has moved out.
This is, I think, the real meaning of becoming a stranger to something: not that you forget it, but that you can no longer get back in.
What Remains
And yet the person in the photograph is not gone in any way that matters, because I am still — in some continuous, stubborn, half-embarrassing sense — in the process of becoming whoever comes after him. The strangeness isn't a wall between us. It's a hallway. Long, and getting longer, but a hallway all the same.
A version of this essay began as three lines in a journal entry from March, under the heading 'things I can't get back into.' I owe that phrase more than it knows.