The Parallel Universe

Sometimes, out of nowhere, nostalgia hits you.

You could be sitting in your room, walking alone on a quiet evening, or listening to an old song, and suddenly the memories of your school days come rushing back. Those sweet, innocent moments return with such intensity that for a few minutes, you completely drift away from the present.

When you visit your hometown after years, the feeling becomes even stronger.

Every street reminds you of a story. Every corner carries a memory. You pass by the school where you spent your teenage years, and suddenly a floodgate opens.

You remember the friendships that felt eternal.

You remember the rainy days when reaching home soaked felt like an adventure.

You remember the exam days that once felt like the biggest battles of your life.

You remember the heartbreaks that seemed impossible to recover from.

And somehow, you even smile at those painful moments.

Then, among all those memories, there is that one person.

The school crush.

You still remember the exact day you saw them for the first time. You remember that brief eye contact that lasted only a few seconds but stayed in your mind for the entire night. You remember creating imaginary conversations that never happened and finding reasons to walk through the same corridor again and again.

At that age, everything felt magical.

Then come the memories of college.

The first day.

The nervous excitement.

The feeling that life was finally beginning.

The friends who became family.

The canteen conversations that lasted for hours.

The dreams you built together.

At that time, you genuinely believed those days would never end.

But they did.

And life moved on.

Years later, when you return to those places, something feels strange.

The school has changed.

The college looks different.

The roads you once knew so well have been widened, rebuilt, or replaced altogether.

The city has grown.

New buildings stand where old memories once lived.

Even the tea stall where you spent countless evenings with your friends has disappeared. The entire area looks unfamiliar, as if someone quietly replaced the world you knew with a completely different one.

And then you return home.

Even your own house has changed.

The walls have different colours.

The furniture is different.

The rooms feel smaller than you remembered.

Everything has moved forward.

And when you finally look at yourself, you realize something even more unsettling.

You are different too.

The person who created those memories no longer exists.

The dreams are different.

The priorities are different.

Even the way you see the world is different.

That is when a strange realization dawns upon you.

The beautiful world you have carried inside your heart for years no longer exists in reality.

It exists only in memory.

That school.

That classroom.

That group of friends.

That version of your city.

That version of yourself.

They all belong to a world that has quietly vanished with time.

The only place where that world is still alive is inside your mind.

Only you can visit it.

Only you can walk through those corridors again.

Only you can relive those summer evenings, those friendships, those first crushes, those victories, and those heartbreaks.

The reality outside is very different from the reality preserved in your memories.

And perhaps that is what nostalgia truly is.

Not a longing for a place.

Not a longing for people.

But a longing for a version of life that can never exist again.

A world that survives only in your imagination.

A world that belongs entirely to you.

And maybe that is why nostalgia is both beautiful and painful at the same time.

And then it hurts.

It feels as if someone has placed a fork in your hand, asked you to put it through your own heart, and slowly twist it, ust enough for you to feel the full intensity of those memories.

Because it allows us to revisit our happiest moments, while gently reminding us that we can never stay there. That's the parallel universe that can't be relived again.