Moving Away From Memory Lane

It’s like reading an old book that we loved as teenagers. We know the ending. The protagonist makes the same mistakes, faces the same adversity. Yet, we replay the nostalgia like a broken record until it skips, temporarily stopping the illusion of rose colored glasses and snapping us back into reality. Every time the record skips, every re-read of the past brings a detail that resonates differently in retrospect.

We keep going back. Not because we expect the curved backroads of our hometowns to bend for us the way they did at seventeen, when we finally got our licenses, but to see if we feel different now driving down the same streets. Does the bakery where we got coffee and a croissant every day still smell the same? Sure. But it will never emulate the warmth it had at 7:12 a.m. every weekday, the comfort we didn’t even know we were chasing. The park where our parents removed the training wheels and cheered as we pedaled into adolescence still stands, the trees still swaying, the wind dragging leaves across the ground in the fall. But it is not the same.

It is never about expecting things to be the same. It’s about understanding that nostalgia is a liar; persuasive, charming and impossible to resist. Sometimes nostalgia dressed up as an awkward thirteen year old who felt like they had to be the loudest in the room to be heard; now we cringe. Nostalgia can feel like passing an ex’s house and what once felt like a pit in your stomach feels like a wave of relief. Nostalgia will look like you stopping at the gas station you went to and your favorite employee no longer works there; nostalgia always wins, why even try to go up against it. 

And yet, we take a walk down memory lane time and time again. The streets, the corner stores; are the only one way mirrors to remind ourselves what we once were. Each return carries the weight of the years; the subtle aches we didn’t understand at fifteen finally click, the awkwardness we survived, the quiet victories that felt small but changed the trajectory of our lives. Revisiting a place we once loved, lived in or just inhabited is not about reclaiming it as it was. It is discovering ourselves through it, finding ourselves through the lens of who we thought we were and who we have become. 

Nostalgia is merciless. It will show us times where the day was so dark that the night never even came and then that same nostalgia asks us to smile at people who have scorned us, give a grand toast to our enemies, laugh at mistakes that were catastrophic enough to leave and never come back; nostalgia is cruel. But it never stops flattering us.

Maybe that’s the gift of nostalgia disguised as deception. It softens the edges without lying about the lessons. It tells us: you survived. You mattered. You laughed, you stumbled, you grew. And leaving, going, changing, that’s not a betrayal of home; it’s proof that we are moving, that we are alive, that we are more than the echoes of seventeen-year-old selves racing down streets with too much hope and too little sense.

Here at The Edge, we keep taking that walk down memory lane, knowing it’s a dead end, but not regretting a single step. Because the journey isn’t about getting somewhere else, it’s about recognizing how far we’ve already come. Nostalgia will lie, flirt, tease, and sometimes sting. But if we listen closely, it also reminds us of the one truth that never changes: we survived, we grew, and we are still very much alive.