A song suddenly coursed through his heart, stirring memories & retrieving images of times having had as much fun with friends as was possible without anyroo getting hurt, excepting of course the livers of all. The song’s chorus went I go out on Friday night / and I come home on Saturday morning, sung by the rooette in Nouvelle Vague, covering The Specials. How much this song was attached to a particular weekend in Providence, Rhode Island, wherein with friends he stayed with strangers & did just as the song sang. Indeed, he remembered awaking the next day & being slightly drunk still, having to soon drive home nevertheless, enveloped by a sunlight perfect & morning air crisp. Somehow— & it was important to know how, he felt— it was one of his happiest memories.
        And now, this evening— around a decade later— he was struck by a nostalgia, almost overcome by a nostalgia. And it was a nostalgia akin to the kind felt for his childhood spent with his father, all of the days of his happy youth. Not only could ten years ago never be returned to, but its contents couldn’t be reached back into & pulled back to the present; or, more precisely: not, at any rate, with the same (largely positive) emotional results as experienced before.

It was in this manner that the Rooster realized that something had newly shifted in his heart, that something was indeed different from prior. For while some nostalgias can be 1) somewhat slaked by possession of an object from the desired former time, or 2) hopelessly stared at upon entering a photograph, dwelling in memory— there was nothing actually, physically, really blocking him from calling up those same friends & purchasing a bus ticket & grabbing a pint of whiskey & having a go at the town anon & anew, like in the happy days of old.
        And yet there was a block, all the same & immovably: it was mental and emotional, partly having to do with the imagination, and perhaps the word necessity, as well (though he couldn’t say why these last two words came to his tongue’s tip). Suffice it to say: he just wasn’t feeling it anymore; and that, it seemed, was that.

You either are or you are not feeling it; and he just wasn’t any longer. But those times, the times when he was: he loved intensely, despite how they may’ve adversely affected his health in many ways. Yet he also knew he could never go back, not like he once did, not as blissfully fully & with the same wanton abandon. Those days are gone, he said to himself aloud— to the tune & in the words of another chorus line, this time from The Magnetic Fields.
        And while it was a good thing in most ways, it was also sad in others. It was sad that such brands of fun affected the body in such a lousy manner; they were happy times, overflowing with that certain [temporarily] limitless exuberance of emotion which only alcohol makes possible, takes hand in hand like hand in glove.

That the song & the images coming to mind along with it triggered in him nostalgia — a nostalgia he could no longer respond to in the same manner as he might’ve just a few years back— caused him to realize that something in him had changed. Not, however, that this necessarily guaranteed anything as regarded his future actions, however. To wit: if in fact it really was the case that he’d grown out of certain shoes: when could he expect for new shoes to arrive in their place? and would he regularly wear them anyways when they came? what would keep him from opting to just endure the constricting pain of persisting in his old-yet-familiar shoes until they were really trashed & in tatters? leaving his feet bloodied & in blisters? The answers would have to remain to be seen.