That ache for the past you keep replaying isn't love for what was. It's nostalgia editing out the parts you were glad to leave.

The thought behind it

The work here is precision: calling the thing what it is instead of what it has been politely mistaken for. Under The Honest Mirror the discomfort is the mechanism — you cannot correct a position you refuse to look at. Watch what “nostalgia” does here. Change it and the sentence becomes comfortable again, which is how you know it matters.