What makes you feel nostalgic?
Some people live in the past, some live in the present, and some live in the future. I’ve never quite managed the first two. My imagination has always leaned forward, toward what might be, what could still be built, what decisions made today might open up possibilities fifty years from now. I live with one foot in a world that has not happened yet.
But lately the past has been knocking.
We’re preparing to move in two years—leaving a five-bedroom house for a two-bedroom apartment. To make room for the future, we have to sort through the past. Every cupboard, every box in storage, every shelf in my study. I’ve joked that it will take the full two years to get through it all, but I suspect the real work isn’t the boxes—it’s the stories they contain.
My library will go. That surprises people more than it surprises me. The books were never sacred; the learning was. Anything I truly need, I can find again. I don’t need to hold the pages to keep the knowledge.
But then there’s my uncle’s roll-top desk. Beautiful, impractical, heavy with memory. He was a cartoonist and a visual artist, endlessly creative, and we understood each other in a way that didn’t need many words. He left me the desk in his will. Letting it go feels like loosening my grip on a doorway to him. It is strange how timber can feel like relationship, how furniture can feel like inheritance.
Other things are easier to release. The old road bike I never ride. The golf clubs that represent a hobby I never truly began. There’s no ache in those. They can find a better life elsewhere.
But the photographs—those stop me. There’s something about the way an image collapses time. You hold the photo, and for a moment it holds you. I’ve been sitting with a picture of a friend I knew in my twenties. We studied together. We drove up the coast for stu-vac. We lost and found each other over the years, on holidays, at hurried lunches, in postcards and phone calls. Then he vanished into the blank spaces of adulthood. “Working overseas,” someone said. After that, nothing. No social media. No search results. No trace. It’s odd how a person can feel both present and missing at the same time.
As we let go of furniture and paperwork and shelves of books, I find myself thinking less about what I’m losing and more about who I’ve been. I remember that I am someone who works toward the future, yes—but I am also someone who has been shaped by friendship, by creativity, by the generosity of people who once shared my life. Nostalgia, at its best, doesn’t trap me in the past. It helps me carry what was good into what comes next.
I suppose that’s what makes me feel nostalgic: not the things, but the people. The ones who drifted in for a season. The ones whose presence changed me. The ones I can no longer find but can still feel.
If the past arrives to visit me while I’m packing, I hope I’ll let it sit awhile. Not to stay forever, but to walk me to the door of the future.
And please let me know if you can give the roll-top desk a good home.
The Afterword 
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