nostalgia

It wasn’t just the places he yearned for, but also their absence. That hollow ache that arises when someone, somewhere is left behind, abandoned. The emptiness. The longing. The haunting that, when studied too closely, regarded too freely, gives way to searing, exquisite pain.

For he long ago realized that yearning, pain, sorrow, these are not so separate from beauty, from joy. From being alive and awake and connected. From fending off the numbness that comes from too much comfort, too much control.

So he wanders through and moves on—sometimes to return, sometimes not. And he opens, awakens, to the haunting, the torture, the beauty that he carries forth.