I miss riding my bike around my suburban neighborhood with the neighborhood kids.
I miss knocking on my neighbor's door and them knocking on mine, asking if their kids were available to play outside and vice versa.
I miss the days where the only way you could listen to music was through a CD, cassette, or vinyl record.
I miss portable CD players and our goofy looking black headphones that we plugged into the large, round, portable, CD player.
I miss the simplicity of being awkward, and shy, and that being okay; a time when there was none of this 'fake-it-til-you-make-it-look-like-life-is-great-all-the-time' exhausting and unrealistic standard that our generation has insisted on portraying.
I miss the joy of being innocent and happy.
I miss the fashion of the 90s.
I miss the slowness of time.
I miss the times when reading classics was not a 'nerd' thing, it was a cool thing. I miss the time when we all weren't 'too busy' to read for fun because college and life itself demands so much from us constantly.
I miss physical photo albums and scrapbooking in real time.
I miss paper and pen, journals, and fresh, clean white paper. Old school style. A time when computers were only desktops, and not laptops.
I miss the times when we didn't ask each other out on Instagram or Snapchat or via text, but in real life, despite how awkward and uncomfortable we may have felt. A time when we felt true feelings, in real time. A time when 'Netflix and chill' didn't exist.
A time when we didn't know what social media was, nor did we depend on it to maintain our social statuses, or make us look cooler than we actually are.
A time when the number of followers didn't determine our worth or how people saw us.
I miss the times when we would use our house phones, call our friends, and talk for hours until their mom told them it was time for dinner; that they had to go, that they'd see us in class the next day, where we could continue the conversation from the night before.
I miss the days before iPhones and Apple products.
Overall, I miss the simplicity of times past; of the 90s, and I wish it could come back, but we are too far gone.
As a generation, I feel we have lost touch with reality, myself included, and I wish we could go back. For now, we can reminisce on the fact that there were good times, and even now, in the age of now, we still find time to break away and get back to the simplicity of life. We can create our own simplicity in the midst of a new eraThat, to me, is semi-comforting.
