I went to China last November. I hadn’t been there since I lived there in 2018, and it felt surreal to return. It was such a huge chapter in my life, I often feel like I froze at 19 years old and stopped aging internally. But that can’t be true because I don’t recognize that person anymore.

I went back to the street I used to live on in Shanghai, visited my old fruit stand, and bought my favorite giant juicy oranges—the ones I’ve never been able to find in any other country but think about far too frequently.

I thought it would hit me harder, but that old China life felt so far away, like it was a different person whose partial memories somehow exist in the back of my brain.

I’ve always been a super nostalgic person, nostalgic for things I don’t even know or remember, but there’s something to be said for the walls of separation that grow over time. For one, it’s healthier. The past is as much a fantasy as the future is. To forget is to be—here, as you are now. And secondly, well, impermanence is a law of this physical rotting reality. Come. Live. Rot. Return. No point in trying to sabotage the unsabotagable.

It’s even stranger to mourn mournfulness, though, than it is to mourn what once was. I think I just like to mourn. Every minute is another flower tossed into a grave, every person is another stone in my metaphysical yard of love lost, every city another mausoleum of past lives. But the inverse of to mourn is to celebrate. They’re sort of the same thing if you think about it.