Of Celestial Nostalgia

It started with Saturn.

I was looking up for some details of night sky these days (and an impending solar eclipse), an almost guilty reminder of a passionate hobby during under-grad, and I was reminded of a homepage of a friend which used to carry a pretty useful software which formed my desktop screensaver for years, one I was really proud of showing off. While the homepage didn’t exist, a google search landed me elsewhere, on some blogs, which took me somewhere else, which further took me to some defunct blogs of people I knew in what almost feels like a past life. I was reminded of times when I wanted to get away from that life because I was getting tired of being a nobody among a league of extraordinary gentlemen.

For a few maniacal minutes, I just wanted to go back again. Desperately. To a life, I think, I will end up liking more than my current one, when I look back later. To passions pursued with dead seriousness, only to be dropped inexplicably the moment I stepped out of that life into another. To some of those people who I always wanted to emulate, but never had the ability to do so. To some likeminded people. To some of those moments which will be difficult to forget, the banality and mundaneness notwithstanding. To some of those mistakes and bloopers I can’t believe I committed. To some of those blistering Mays, sticky Augusts, freezing Januaries and there’s-something-in-the-air Marches.

Sometimes it takes the unlikeliest of instances to take you to a life you left behind, and the smallest of pokes to remind you how much you still miss it. I am glad for the whole lot of us from the same mould who seem to have found a better life afterwards, owing to whatever reasons.