Someday, Everything Will Be a Love Parade

Suddenly, I felt like listening to ORANGE RANGE's "Love Parade." The moment the intro flowed from my earphones, my vision blurred, and I was instantly pulled back to summer vacation in elementary school.

For our generation, they were more than just artists. During our elementary and junior high school years, their music flowed through the air in classrooms and after school as if it were part of the atmosphere. Back then, when they were incredibly popular, "Love Parade" was my favorite among their many masterpieces. That song was, without a doubt, the "latest" of my youth and the very essence of dazzling excitement.

However, after more than 20 years, it has transformed into a device labeled "nostalgia."

It makes me wonder. The things I feel are "latest" and pursue now, and this very moment that makes my heart tremble, will also be classified as "those nostalgic days" once they pass through the massive filter of time.

The first smartphone I ever owned, the iPhone 4. That edgy texture and the feeling of the "future" fitting in the palm of my hand. At the time, that was the cutting edge of the world. But now, if I were to pick it up, we would feel an endearing sense of the "past" in its small size and low specs.

Music, movies, and anime, too. And even the houses and towns we live in. A room you've just moved into feels like a special place where the whiteness of the walls and the scent of the floor are all fresh. But after a few months or years, it becomes just "everyday life," melting into a landscape that stirs no emotion.

Humanity has always lived through this accumulation. On the day the Lascaux cave paintings were created, they were undoubtedly the clan's "latest art." Even the temples in ancient capitals that are now revered as national treasures or world heritage sites must have been brand-new, smelling of fresh wood when they were built. People back then must have squinted at that brilliance, watched it eventually become "the norm," and then, over a long period of time, watched it sublimate into "history."

Thinking about it that way, I can even find this current sadness a little endearing. No matter how new the technology or how vivid the emotion, time treats them all equally, maturing them and turning them into a gentle sepia tone.

The latest becomes the everyday, and the everyday turns into nostalgia. That cycle is the very footprint of how humans have built up civilization and memory.

While listening to the magic that can take me back to that summer vacation, I continue to take steps forward through this "today"—which is shiny and new, but will eventually grow old and one day become nostalgic.