Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations

by Jonny Sun

maybe nostalgia is to feel a happiness about something that is over because it is over. That in order to feel happy about it, it must be something that you can’t go back to and affect, that you can’t mess up from where you are now, but also, that you can’t really feel at all.

Without a deadline, time feels too open to be peaceful. That freedom is crushing because it feels like looking at a big, blank canvas of usable time, and then being forced to solve how to use it best. It takes so much work just to get to figuring out what to do with the time! There are too many possibilities, too much potential, and by extension, too much pressure. Because what if I do the wrong thing? What if I squander the options?