Always Coming Home

I recently moved across the country to join a new band. I left behind my friends and family, all my connections, the town that I had been living in for the last eight years and the state that I had grown up in. I've been feeling nostalgic lately, thinking back on images and people that I've left behind and almost consciously trying to create some kind of sense of longing for what is back in Colorado.
I've realized though that nostalgia is something I have to work at. I genuinely miss my friends and my mountains, but I have to labor to create that sense of need. I have to have leisure to dwell on these images to make them become potent enough so that I can actually feel nostalgic. I've come to realize that nostalgia is something that I retreat to when I'm unhappy with the present. I don't really want to move back to Colorado, I don't want to leave behind what I've built for myself here on the West Coast, but sometimes that old life seems safer and more sane. It becomes an object of nostalgia because I'm trying to either avoid or reconcile myself to something that's happening around me right now. I know now that the nostalgia that I create for myself allows me to rose-tint the past and throw myself back into a slightly mythologized personal past that's more welcoming than my present. Past relationships, former nighttime hang-outs, favorite restaurants, hikes or camp sites, all these things have left behind their empirical and historical personal meaning and have become subtly different psychological images, speaking more to my insecurity in my new home than any authentic longing to return to my home state.