BUTTERFLY DREAMS

You can get a bit soppy when you’re under the weather, so when I randomly remembered a song my daughter loved listening to when she was younger, I made the mistake of playing it on YouTube and found myself going just a little bit wobbly.

Perhaps because the post-Christmas and New Year period expects us to look forward rather than back, it caught me off guard as I slipped into a warm, fuzzy nostalgia for days spent walking through nearby woods and valleys in summer, going for picnics, reading her books under cloudless skies, and not having a care in the world as we existed in that father and daughter space of childhood, where you are invited to see the world anew through the eyes of a younger person.

Now that father and daughter are older, the world seems less sympathetic to enjoying such pure moments as we wrestle with one existential crisis after another in this crazy modern world, where our phones capture memories before our hearts do, and we drift further away from spontaneous memory making into contrived memory making.

It has always been a battle dealing with the sentimentality police, who admonish you for indulging in simple things such as Hannah Montana and her dad singing together in the shade of a sunlit field somewhere in Crowley Corners, Tennessee.

But here in the nihoslopalypse of 2026, it did me good to tune into a wholesome, uncynical memory from before the world spun off its axis into meta oblivion, reminding me just how necessary heartfelt, borderline maudlin sentiments are in cushioning the insanity of the modern world we’re currently living through.