the days of gillyflower

You know that feeling?

The one that hits in the midst of the day when you have emails unread, you haven’t checked most of the items in your to do list, you have to make some “important” calls, you have to keep living your current life but the feeling just stops you, with an old song and tells you “Stop here. Remember.” And you do because who are you to protest? Stand strong in front it? You are its slave. You are weak. When it comes, it kicks down the door and grins at your face, with a cigarette on his mouth, sits on the couch and stares at you. You don’t have the weapons to fight. And to be honest, even if you did, you wouldn’t use them. So you stop what you are doing and just go sit next to him on the couch. You surrender. To the feeling. To the song. To the nostalgia.

Because the song reminds you. It will never be the same again, right? The nights spent on the stairs smoking together and the nights when you danced until the morning and the street food you got together while talking about heaven and hell in the languages that were new to you, with the people from different stories, the streets you walked with heartache, crying, the houses you lived in and the knocks on the door of those houses. Keys. Hangovers. Secrets. Smells. Winter. Dinner parties. Hand written notes. Betrayals and forgiveness. The intimacy felt between friends and lovers.

It will just never be the same. Those people are now all around the world. There is still an epidemic and maybe one day, most of us will die in the World War 3.

And if we don’t die in the World War 3, we will keep living and never see most of those people again and even if we do, it will be different. Those people will have different lives, different friends, different lovers and they won’t be really smoking on stairs or dance until the morning anymore. They will have more important things to worry about like bills and where to finally settle down and which school they should send their toddler while they just close their eyes to the fact that they will never get those days back. They will water their plants, make the new recipe they learned at work, make small talk, put their kids to bed and then turn their backs to the “love of my live” in their bed. They will want to crawl back to the “old days”, to excitement, to passion, to love, to mistakes and pain, to all the strong feelings experienced back then.

But they can’t.

That is what the feeling tells you on his 3rd cigarette. He tells you, you had it good back then. Real. Intense. You will never feel the same, ever again. Just surrender to me. Wholly.

But then the song stops. And you don’t really feel like listening to it one more time. That song is from the past, where it belongs. You don’t feel the words you wrote back then. People you wrote those words for aren’t the same people.

You are not the same person.

It all moves on. For today, you kick out the feeling. He is offended.

You know he will come back in an unexpected moment again but for now, you have the rest of your life to live.