Nostalgia sits heavy with you today, as you watch the rain blur and soften the view from the front and rear windows of the house. The various shades of gray differ only slightly from one another, while the trees' limbs seem to feel the weight of your blurry emotional scale, their tips slanted downward, and tiny beads of water, scattered across their outer edges, gleam softly in the dim morning light.
You are sure, in your caffeine-induced, pulse-racing clamor of quiet, that your thoughts cannot unravel themselves to any great end, that they can only graze against one another like a series of brightly-colored bumper cars one finds in a shop situated in a seashore town, where the tinkly music, splattering outside of the building's entrance lures you near and you see the shiny, primary-hued, cartoon-shaped cars ranged along the smooth floor that is a clinical, nondescript blue. You imagine, briefly, squeezing into one of the cars, and the memory of childhood, gum stuck to the seat, slightly rusted edges, smell of antiseptic and cotton candy and stale popcorn send a shudder right through you. You tear yourself away from the small vehicle, avoiding the attached pole that always frightened you as a kid, and wander down the sidewalk and into the shop that vends a thousand varieties of salt water taffy, a strange but delightful concoction. It makes the tears creep into your throat, but you sternly fend them off, allowing the pink-and-white-striped candies, so enticing in their waxen wrappers, to sing sweetly of the fulsomeness of memory, of the lovely, dim shapes that make up the past in friendly, soft ways.
You recognize the nostalgia being steered down the path of least resistance, of comfortable, easy, warm-blanket-and-hot-chocolate-and-crackling-pine-logs coziness, and though you attempt to see through the hazy charade, you feel the gray outside the window, and allow yourself to seep into the cozy reminiscence.
There is no nicer place.





