It'll never be the same, but it'll be okay

You can't sleep. So you’re lying in the dark listening to the album that held your hand when you were sixteen and crying every day.

There are two feelings that you feel. The first one, and also the second one, and you're not sure if they're a thousand emotions or one—it's what you've always called to yourself the "time-is-passing sickness." It's not nostalgia; it's too unpleasant to be nostalgia. And yet you get the sense that it's healing you, like bitter, bitter medicine that soothes.

And the second-first-new-old emotion is even harder to describe. It's a feeling of, within your mind, cradling your younger self as she cries. She hates herself and she probably hates you and she hates everything because she needs so badly to be loved. And nobody could give you that love, even though some of them tried. But, somehow, in this song played in this moment you've gone back to all those years. And you've re-broken your own heart, but also dried your own tears and held your own face in your hands and said, "I love you so much. I see you and I know you and I am you. And you are trying so hard. And I love you, and I'm so proud of you, and please never ever stop trying."