It had happened again. Without warning or fanfare, a sudden intense feeling of nostalgia had invaded his emotional landscape and repainted everything in a retrospective tint. Only, the thing this nostalgia was nostalgic for was something he had done mere hours ago, and could do again within a reasonably imminent future without too much effort or rearranging of schedules. Nevertheless, the feeling persisted, and thus he found himself incredibly anxious about the future. If such a strong nostalgia could strike for things that were still going on, what retroactive marvels would then be in store for those things truly lost to time

He had done the math. The calculations all checked out. In theory, everything should even out with smooth precision, the two sides of the equation fulfilling each and every criteria implied in the symbol called “equals”. And yet, they did not. No matter how precisely he fine-tuned the amounts, double-checked the sums and parallel-parked the quantities, there always seemed to be ever so slightly more of the one than the other. Attempting to even the scales inevitably ended up with there being more of the other than of the one, forever

Defeated, he put away the now empty milk carton and chewed through the remaining cereal, his equilibrium perturbed