The Reality of Nostalgia

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I started life in a particularly grotty area in which junkies roamed the streets and little children would shit on the floor in public. Some girl I knew once squat one out under a slide in the park and told me to keep it a secret. She said that I should tell people a dog had done it, which was fine because as far as I was concerned a fucking dog had done it. I was disgusted, appalled, and about five years old. Thankfully we moved away and it was only the other day, about twenty years later that I decided to return to it. I looked up the old road that had shaped my initial impression of the world when I was kicked in the balls by a wave of nostalgia. The place was exactly how I'd remembered it... the streets were paved with faeces and syringes littered the floor acting as obstacles for the children as they played their daily game of 'don't get AIDs'. What struck me the most however was how small the place now seemed. I wondered what the chap who bought our old house thought of the place, but of course I couldn't ask him. Not because I didn't have the confidence but rather that he'd made his answer quite obvious several years earlier by stringing himself up from a nearby lamppost and hanging himself. Oh well.