There are moments when I realise, with a kind of cold clarity, that entire worlds I once lived in have vanished. The world of 1990 — its atmosphere, its colours, its sounds, the way people moved and dressed and expected the future to unfold — no longer exists in any living form. And what unsettles me most is knowing that even if I had infinite wealth, every resource ever generated, I still couldn’t return to that world. Money can build cities and resurrect brands, but it cannot reconstruct a moment in time. That truth forces me to confront the one boundary I can never cross: time moves forward, and nothing I do can stop it.
When I acknowledge this, I feel how little control I have over the passage of years. I can shape my choices, my surroundings, my routines, but I cannot keep the world from changing, nor can I reopen the doors that have closed behind me. Understanding that the world of a particular year — especially one that shaped me — has disappeared completely is more than historical awareness. It is an encounter with my own mortality. The past doesn’t fade softly; it drops into an unreachable dimension, sealed off from the present no matter how vividly I remember it.
What makes this loss so sharp is that I didn’t merely observe that world — I lived inside it. I breathed its air without knowing how temporary it was. I walked streets and listened to music that felt utterly normal at the time, as if they would always be there. When I think back to 1990 now, I’m not just remembering a culture; I’m remembering myself. The person I was then — with that particular set of hopes, perceptions, and innocence — is just as unreachable as the era itself. Letting that sink in brings a kind of grief I didn’t expect to carry into adulthood.
The recent past feels especially cruel in this way. It’s close enough that I can recall it in detail — the fashion, the fragrances, the texture of daylight, the sound of particular voices — yet it remains impossibly far. A vanished world is not like a missing object; I can’t replace it or recover it. Its nearness makes the loss sharper, not softer. The past begins to feel almost autonomous, as if it exists independently of me, watching from a distance I cannot cross. I reach for it, but it has slipped into another realm where I cannot follow.
And yet, the fact that I feel this so strongly tells me something important about myself. I was present in my own life. I noticed things. I absorbed the world as it existed then, and it left an imprint that still lives in me. The emotional weight I feel now isn’t a flaw; it’s evidence that those years mattered. Even though I can never go back, my memory holds what time has taken, and that is its own kind of survival. The world of 1990 is gone forever, but the fact that I mourn it means I truly lived through it — and that, in its own way, is a form of meaning that time cannot erase.