Welcome to the New Nostalgia

They say the world was once wider,
measured in scraped knees and firefly nights,
in the space between streetlights,
where time was counted in the hush before dinner.

They say the air was thick with lilac and laughter,
that voices carried farther,
that hands learned to hold more than restless machines,
that silence did not hum like an unanswered message.

They say there was a time before the glow,
before the buzz, before the world fit inside a pocket,
before presence became a currency
we would never know but traded for connection.

We trace ghosts on cold screens,
watch our reflections blur into pixels,
scroll through a reminiscence we were never promised,
watch movies of childhoods we will never meet.

We measure the past in filters, in captions,
in pictures where no one looks at the camera,
where the sun is setting but no one feels it,
where the moment is proof, but never the point.

They say they ran barefoot through summers,
that their hands held fireflies instead of phones,
that they remembered the sky because they watched it.

We will only remember because it was recorded.

And that will be enough – 
because this is the nostalgia we inherited.