(F*cking) Sentimentality.

There was a painting which hung at the end of a carpeted hallway in an old friend’s house, at the corner of the street I used to live on. I’d like to think this painting wasn’t chosen for its beauty—honestly, it was wholly ugly. However, it was chosen for some reason, someone paid for it, someone hung it there, in that spot, thinking it was perfect. It may still hang there, enjoyed now by my old friend, their parents long since having passed on. The last time I saw it was decades ago, and if I saw it tomorrow—while I was browsing a thrift store, or visiting a friend’s home, or stumbling across it online—I know I’d be immediately transported back to that hallway, back in time, to the feeling I used to have when playing with my friend in that carpeted hallway.

Sentimentality does not care if a movie was good, if an album aged well, if a painting was beautiful, or a smell was disgusting. It cares only about the emotional bond, the attachment your mind originally creates to that object, or experience. Once that bond forms it becomes an incredibly strong connection, one that is extremely meaningful and challenging to separate yourself from. You see, love is the needier of the two siblings. It craves a presence, like a narcissist loves a one-sided argument. It needs someone to grasp and hold on for dear life. Sentimentality, though, behaves differently. It doesn’t desire a second act the way love does. It is the outcast, the loner standing against the corner wall at a party but is watching every one, and every thing. It can hit you while standing in a grocery store aisle, blindside you with a smell, or destroy you with a song playing on the car stereo. Love is a duet, a dance, a conversation while sentimentality is the letter from an incredible lover left in a drawer you find years later.

Until days ago, I used to think sentimentality was the lesser feeling of the two—lost in love’s shadow. Now, after writing this piece, I believe it may be something opposite. Sentimentality is love, minus all the shit that got in its way. I don’t think we give enough credit to it for how much it fucks with us, the carnage it is able to achieve. We always seem to blame heartbreak on love. We blame the ache of missing someone on love. Perhaps it is sentimentality that is doing the real damage, hiding in the shadow, smirking, destroying us for a longer period of time, never fully letting us go.