Thoughts
My fifth emotion, and the one currently incapacitating me, is what I'm going to call "time sickness." It's a feeling of dread at the
inexorable passage of time, a longing for the past, a fear of aging all at once. It's tinged with nostalgia; indeed at one point I thought this was nostalgia. But nostalgia is used today as a positive thing. This feeling is not. It's a terrible crushing weight; the weight of everything I've ever done and ever will do compressed into a moment. It's a violently intense homesickness for a time that you will never again experience. And it's the knowledge that the present too will one day be as far out of reach as the past currently is. And there's nothing you can do about it except stare at the picture and try to remember. I could shake it off, I could move on, but I feel an obligation not to.