Nostalgia is Weird

I recently visited my parents in my hometown, and it made me very melancholy. I was homesick. I was nostalgic in its most literal etymological sense: "the pain of returning home." I had come back to the place where I was raised. I saw the schools I had gone to as a child, I visited my childhood church. I met some of my childhood friends. I drove by my childhood home. But none of them were as I remembered them. All of them had changed. They were subtly unfamiliar in a million different ways. There is something paradoxical about yearning for one's childhood. Children rarely want to be children. My niece and nephew want to grow up and be adults, I certainly did when I was their age. When I was eight, I had to put up with my parents' arbitrary whims. And I had to spend eight hours a day in Child Prison. I hated Child Prison much more than college or any of my adult jobs. I could hardly wait to live on my own and drive and have my own money. But, perhaps, it isn't so odd. I don't really…