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Publisher's Letter

On Memories of Yesteryear

Posted

Dear Reader, 

They say you can never truly go back. When you  attempt to revisit old memories, you find they’ve already  dissipated, vanished into  the ether. Those people who  surrounded you in your  younger years have gone  on to experience more of  life, transformed through  stages of maturity. Those  golden moments of youth  and yesteryear can never be  duplicated. 

Yes, you can remember  them fondly with a  cherished heart. But one  must understand that the people you once knew no longer  exist as they were. They have been altered by time, shaped  by new characters in their lives, by experiences, and  perhaps by the inevitable loss of innocence that occurs as  one grows up. 

What we call memories are not perfect recordings but  rather institutionalized impressions—cataloged and  preserved in ways that serve our present selves. As adults  mature, these memories intermingle with imagination,  creating narratives that comfort us but drift increasingly  from the actual events that transpired. The photographs  remain yellowed in albums, but our internal images  have been repainted countless times with the brushes of  subsequent experience. 

Each significant life event erodes another layer of  innocence. The first heartbreak, the first betrayal, the first  glimpse of mortality—these moments forever alter our  perception, making it impossible to view the world through  the same unclouded lens again. This loss of innocence isn’t  merely a subtraction; it’s a transformation. We trade the  blissful ignorance of youth for the bittersweet wisdom of  experience, gaining depth while surrendering simplicity. 

In essence, the past holds no fixed reality. As time  progresses, what remains is not what was, but what we  need it to have been—a beautiful but ultimately transitory  chapter in our ongoing evolution, preserved in amber but  never again accessible in its original form. 

On Memories of Yesteryear, Publisher's Letter, Patrick J. Wood, Publisher, Author

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