Moving Onto a New Chapter In Life
I have always hated the word “moving onto a new chapter in life” because it basically implies that I should leave everything behind, all of the memories of people, places, and moments. As you listen to a familiar song, all of the montage of your experience in a specific period of time, glimpse within your eyes. It shows you both the beauty and ugly of it, yet regardless both feels warm and nice. “Moving onto a new chapter in life” seems impossible to do, because everything feels different, even the good ones feels wrong. All of it make you want to come back to that old memories that you keep lingering on. The lighting feels different, the sofa feels different, the wall feels different, the steps on the tatami feels different, everything feels different. You don’t feel well, even worse within the idea that those old memories in reality are not even the same anymore, they changed, they do things differently, they do different things, the place that you thought as home does not feel like home anymore. As the universe revolves, the atoms within your life move as well.
As you thought about this past memories over and over again, a thought lingered in your mind, is it okay to keep living within this memories, or yet is it even possible? You choose not to interact with the new people you’ve met because you are tired of building the relationship all over again, it’s exhausting. Talking about their personal life, opening up about ours as well, are they even trust-worthy? Do they actually care? Or do they live within their own sadness just like me?
As time goes by, as you become vulnerable, you feel like the new atmosphere aren’t so bad after all. New people that used to be a stranger in your new life are now your close ones. One day you will wake up forgetting all of the old memories that used to be trapped in your mind, you get comfortable with them, you sit with them in a cafe everyday asking for advice, talk about your day because it feels nice to have a friend after a long day. The places used to make you feel small and lost, is now your home, you’re so familiar of it, you know every single part of it, even as simple as the paint on the wall, the lighting, wall, sofa, tatami now feels right. You feel like it is your home now, like a new place to rest. New memories are replacing the old ones and you’re fine about it, maybe the new ones are more important after all, since it is the status quo, you can’t linger on the past forever can’t you?
Then an individual human’s greatest enemy in history strikes, that is time. After all this time you have grown familiar to the new chapter, now it is time to move on to a new one. No matter how hard you hold onto a period of time, it will pass, because with time also comes death, that is the root of temporal in humanity. It is an endless journey from one chapter to another and the worst part of it is despite how many times you do it over and over again, it doesn’t get easier. Moving on is as hard as it is on the first time as it is on the last time.
Maybe that is why when people find comfortability in life, when they are able to be content with whatever they have, they settle. They stayed in a time loop in the same place. Repeating a memory over and over again, living in these memories. Maybe then you don’t need to hate it anymore, because it is the only thing that you have. Which makes you wonder at that time, what happened to all of my past memories now?
