Drowning in a Tsunami of Nostalgia

I prefer the past to the future. This preference includes not only literature written long before the present day, period films, flea market trinkets, antiques, vintage clothing, secondhand books/records/tapes/CDs, etc. but extends to my own life. I re-read old e-mails often; I am still friends with people I have known since I was a toddler; and in my mind I frequently imagine and re-imagine what might have been had I done a couple things differently.

Now I'm sure that hardly anyone lives without regret of some sort. But it takes on a different form when in your daydreams (and your night dreams) you are interacting with people who are for all intents and purposes, ghosts. People who, although still living, have become fictional characters, living lives I have imagined for them. Going places the real person has probably never gone; doing things the real person has probably never done. And yet the adventures, joys, heartaches, triumphs and failures lived by my ghosts are so vivid that I almost feel like I still talk to them on a daily basis.

My five year college reunion is happening in June. And while I'm looking forward to spending time with good friends and reconnecting with others I haven't seen in years, I also hope to put some ghosts to rest. I am more haunted by personages from college than from any other period of my life, for reasons I don't fully understand.

Two in particular need to be laid to rest. And I don't know how to get rid of them, but suspect the answer may lay in burying them where it all started, on a quaint college campus on top of a hill.

One of the ghosts wrote this to me about a year ago and as usual, he was better able to say what I feel than I ever could:

i find lately, on the sidewalks of my mind, close people walking
freely. it's not to think of them, but more that they're there all the time,
carried without form but with weight.

you i've tried to place at specific moments, not like 'where is she' or 'what's she up to', more like 'at this moment she's getting up from a chair', 'right now she's brushing her teeth on the left lower side'.mostly it's just wondering...

cycles and the ever present. hasn't been too long, time is a storage mechanism.

It's a strange experience to learn that my ghost regards me as ghost, imagines me the way I have imagined him in the five years since he left me standing on a New England small town Main Street on a misty May afternoon, watching him walk out of my life. But somehow I feel a little more real, and a little less crazy, to know I'm not the only one with a vivid imagination.