Temporal Homesickness

Sometimes it arrives quietly,
like a faint song drifting from another room.

Not sadness exactly,
more like the ache of remembering
a place that still exists
somewhere behind the calendar.

I call it temporal homesickness.

A longing not for a house,
not for a city,
but for a decade.

For the 1980s,
when the future felt enormous
and the world hummed with the electric promise
of things just beginning.

Back when music came through cassette tape hiss
and every song felt like a signal
sent directly into the bloodstream.

Back when neon lights and synthesizers
painted the night in impossible colors,
and a radio could feel like a portal
to somewhere bigger than your town.

There was a particular sunlight then,
or at least memory insists there was,
golden and slow
falling across parking lots, arcades,
bike handlebars leaning against a curb.

Time moved differently.
Or maybe we did.

Back then the horizon
did not feel like a wall.

It felt like a road.

I miss the feeling
that everything ahead was unwritten,
that the world was still being assembled
one bright idea at a time.

Now the years stack up
like records in a crate,
and sometimes I flip through them
searching for that familiar groove.

And every once in a while
a sound returns,
a drum machine,
a guitar soaked in chorus,
a voice from an old FM station

and suddenly I’m there again.

For a moment
the decades collapse.

The air smells like summer pavement,
the sky glows with neon promise,
and the future opens wide
like a door that never closed.

Then the song ends.

And I’m back here,
carrying the strange comfort
of knowing that somewhere
in the archives of memory

the 1980s are still playing.