Nostalgia

Poem: first love & unspoken words

Essentially, this poem is a portrait of suburban adolescence and the bittersweet feeling of being young and aimless. It reflects that specific window of time before adult responsibility sets in, when life feels both wide open and oddly hollow.

I wanted to touch on the feeling of that transitionary time, that gentle death of youth amidst that desire to freeze time, that wanting to stay in that liminal, unaccountable space of late adolescence, while also knowing, underneath, that you can't.

My hope is that it captures the texture of teenage nights: driving around with no real destination, hanging out in parking lots, the low-grade restlessness of having nothing to do and nowhere to be. There's a hazy, nostalgic quality to it, like 35mm film photography or preserving it in amber, with all its awkwardness and quiet melancholy intact. Perhaps you could relate.

Enjoy.

Nostalgia

we drove until the road ran out of ideas

somebody’s playlist bleeding into static

the night a loose plan between us all

and you the one thing my mind kept returning to

.✦ ݁˖

July was its own kind of gravity

pulling us through the same lit parking lots

the same warm beer cans, the same four faces

the world so small it almost felt like enough for me

.✦ ݁˖

you leaned against the hood and looked at nothing

I kept finding your face anyway

everyone else was so loud

you were the reason I couldn’t find the words to speak

.✦ ݁˖

in the end, we knew we’d be dust

and we all kind of knew it traded the knowing for another night

windows down, the summer pouring through

all of us burning at the same low frequency

.✦ ݁˖

I never said it, you never asked

the drive home always felt too short

that’s the only way I knew

that’s the only way I believed you liked me too

---