Nostalgia reading

Good or not so good?
 
Before I separated from my ex, I wrote a book with a friend. It was a bloke friend and he was married. His wife had just announced she was gay, rather putting a question mark over 20 years of marriage, and I was experiencing all kinds of extreme marital non-bliss. We didn’t have any kind of relationship, but supported each other and told each other a lot of stuff that no-one else knew about.
 
Writing the book was our salvation and release. Whenever possible (actually not as often as we would have liked), we chatted online, planned the next bits of the story and discussed the recent writing. Needless to say, the badly written and even more badly edited book was rejected by the one publisher we tried – but genuinely that didn’t matter. The important part was the writing, the mutual support and the commitment we had made to each other to do it. 
 
Son gave me an ebook reader for Christmas this year, so while I was waiting for the CDROM’s of books that I ordered from eBay to arrive, I downloaded our book onto the reader. For the first time in ten years I read it again.
 
The book is now very dated, although it was contemporary to our situation at the time. The characters and incidents were all based on a mishmash of our various experiences and reading it again now, I’m able to totally relive how life was then for both of us. I feel both his and my pain all over again. I remember things I had completely forgotten and laugh again at the humour that kept me sane. I’m reliving that time of unexpectedly smiling at inappropriate times when thinking about our writing. 
 
To anybody else, the book would not flow well. The characters are not coloured in – probably because we “knew” them and didn’t need to. Many of the references are oblique and the (sometimes cynical) humour would be missed.  But it’s scary just how much of the me-then and the him-then is written down and explored.
 
I’m not sure that it was a good thing for me to read it. I don’t feel better for having awakened those memories and I feel a kind of regret that there will probably never be another time that is so intensely passionate (not talking about sex here, just for the record; that’s a different sort of passion!) and satisfying. 

But whether good or not so good for me, I’ve wallowed in nostalgia.