This bad habit of romanticizing the past needs to go away. Yes, I understand that those days of carefree laughter might never come back, but isn’t that a part of growing up? Isn’t that how you enter the dull skies of adulthood, by leaving any possible feeling behind? In trying to eject the nostalgia, this longing for what has passed and may never come again, I begin my twenties. 

I have a photograph of Lahore pinned up the cramped walls of my downtown dorm room; it gets smaller and smaller each year as they uplift another patch of grass to construct a high-rise. I had such an ideal view of the skyline and the Catholic church, old-fashioned, before these new-age buildings came and disrupted my space. But I digress.

It is a photograph from the sheesh-mahal, the palace of mirrors, found inside the Lahore Fort, taken from the inside which is ironic because the public isn’t allowed to enter the sheesh-mahal. Closed off for years so that the thousands of sparkling cut mirrors stay preserved, untouched, hidden away as if they were memories from the past. There is a metaphor in there somewhere, I just don’t know if I’m ready to look for it. 

This photograph is from a past life, from a memory hidden deep within. 

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Sana Mohsin is an undergraduate at the University of Toronto studying Economics and English. She likes trees and peppermint tea, and hopes to somehow make a career out of reading and writing.