Anemoiaan-uh-moi-uh

n. Nostalgia for a time you never experienced. Looking at old photos, you feel a pang of nostalgia for an era you never lived through. Longing to step through the frame into a world of black and white, if only to watch the locals passing by.

These people lived and died before any of us arrived. They sleep in the same houses, look up at the same moon—and live in a completely different world. A world still covered in dust from the frontier. A world of adults, whose lives are hammered out by hand.

You'd watch them carry on with lives that seem so important. Trying to look into their eyes, so piercing and otherworldly. They have no way of knowing that their story has already been written.

That world is now gone. If the past is a foreign country, we're only tourists. We can't expect to understand the locals. The photo itself means very little, in the end. Maybe all we wanted was the frame—so we could sit for a few minutes in a world with clean borders that protect us from the rush of time.