notes on nostalgia

i have been lingering in back to school aisles. searching for the mechanical #2 pencils i always used to buy, flipping through the notebooks, testing out the pens. i have been organizing old writing, reading through essays from three, four years back, trying to remember where i was when i wrote them, how i felt turning them in. i have been coming up with new ways to learn, to satisfy the craving of digesting new information— subscribing to more substacks, downloading more news apps. i have been treating small tasks like assignments, writing everything down, my favorite quotes from the books i’m reading, leaning into the familiarity of the act.

i have been fortunate enough to spend the first 22 years of my life within the comforting and unending inspiration of a rewarding education. september has always been my month of new beginnings, much more so than the start of the calendar year. sure, i still set all of my new year’s intentions, but my most concrete drive to instill change comes out of hibernation at the end of each summer, not at the start of each year. and now, it’s september fifth, and the drive is back, but it feels newly untethered.

it comes as no surprise that this transition away from school has been big— but to me, it feels more like a move away from home. i left and i didn’t choose to. i had to leave the harmonious environment i spent four years nurturing and it’s simple really. i miss home. i miss my flat, living with my best friend, the peaceful, salty, crisp air of the environment i grew so accustomed to and, i realize after the fact, reliant on.

and for some reason i hesitate to say these things, to feel them fully out loud, because it seems counterproductive. i don’t pretend to know the secret formula to living completely in the present, but i know it doesn’t involve lingering in the past. i know this and even still, i want to feel all of it now, fresh, fully.

i am told that dwelling doesn’t help with big changes. but i do dwell. i dwell because i am a dweller and i believe i am stronger and better off for it. i encourage my mind to rest in nourishing images: my expansive windows overlooking the green fields beyond and above the town’s edge; my mornings spent swimming in the manmade pool on castle sands or working at the counter in taste, my favorite coffee shop; laughter and emotion and epiphany-filled walks with friends down the expansive shorelines that line the powerful yet inviting north sea; blind tesco and m&s anchovy taste tests and fridge-pasta dinners with my flatmate; energetic midday run-ins on market street that spiraled into spontaneous errands and adventures and shared pastries. 

dwelling almost feels like a cheat word. it’s too simple; it conjures up too picturesque an image. i am not the girl staring longingly out the window, wearing a soft smile. i am the girl, willing herself onto the fields racing past her seat so that she might run back, wiping snotty tears onto her sweater sleeve after giving up on the tissues for the entirety of the six hour train down to london. and now, i am the girl crying, publicly, after a wave of remembering the heaviness and longing in my heart comes over me as suddenly as a heat flash. 

i want to pause time, just for a little while, and live within the walls of my memories. i have overwhelming, overflowing amounts of love for that place, that community, that experience, and now, as of june 17th, no outlet for all of it. where do i put all of the love?

the obvious answer is, of course, into my present. into this place, this community, this experience. but i don’t want this love to be used anywhere else, at least not yet. i don’t know that it should ever be. i am protective of this love the way a mother protects her child by never letting them out of her sight; i want to nurture it, feed it, not release it out into the big and scary world. 

and so, here i am, existing, unrestrained, within my nostalgia. this is, of course, nothing new. i came into this life nostalgic, and its more transitional phases are often a delicate balance between looking at a moment i’m currently living in through the (sometimes paper thin, sometimes much thicker) peachy-tinted lens of idealism often projected onto the past, and living, lens sidestepped, in the present moment itself. 

and now this balance has been thrown off its course. i feel the brilliance of my past and i feel the pain of feeling it all so fully, but placing this mountain of emotion inside a little box in my heart feels like taking my last four years worth of paintings, my most prized work, setting them out in the sunlight, and watching the colors fade. it feels as though i’m placing them into some machine that shrinks them down to a fraction of the size they were when i made them, so that i can’t see all the vibrant details i spent so much time and put so much love into creating. 

each moment i spend living inside of my memories is a moment away from my immediate surroundings and all of the little joys it has to offer, all of its wonderful pieces waiting to be seen and appreciated, but i feel this primal need not to let the colors fade or the details shrink.

i put in headphones and i stand in the sun of my living room and i play the songs that deliver me back to my mornings in my flat most clearly-- “nascer viver morrer”, “sunset canyon”, “misty morning”, “intolewd”-- songs that still hold with them the textures and scents of the place i used to listen to them in. i play these songs and others and i close my eyes and i feel an all-encompassing departure from the woven rug beneath my bare feet and arrival back into my thick socks on my carpeted floors. 

the powerful reins of this nostalgia enter with the senses associated with these memories, its grip over me sneaking in through the simplest of sensory souvenirs: the wave of goosebumps that came over me each morning as i folded my thick duvet over itself and sat up in bed, or the smell of a freshly blown out match after lighting the candle on my postcard-lined shelf. 

this is a nostalgia rooted not in my heart or my mind, but at the very center of my being, in the middle of my rib cage, and when it’s activated i feel myself being taken over. it is deeply disorienting, this unrooted movement through time, though when a sea of it comes over me i do my best to float in it for as long as i can. to engage with it somehow, test the memory, take a look around, unlock new details. 

this searching becomes more desperate as time goes on, because the tangibility and three-dimensionality of these associations is shrinking with each day, moving slightly farther out of reach with each listen. i exist between two opposing forces, one that wants to play the song i woke up to to over and over throughout my days, and one that hesitates over the play button, knowing that with each listen it all becomes just that slight bit more pixilated— the feeling of my head on my pillow, the coolness of the dainty silver chain in my fingers as i pull up my window shade, the ever-so-faint smell of wood mingling with humidity coming from my top shelf as i reached for a sweatshirt, the moistness in the scottish coastal air forever trapped in my closet. 

i have been waking up each night between two and three am. each night, like clockwork, my body wakes me up five hours early in new york, but right on time five time zones across the atlantic. i am in the midst of trying to bridge the gap between these two time zones, to turn my love for my past into more love for my present. i am lucky enough to love my present too, but when will focusing on being where my two feet are planted stop feeling like i’m somehow cheating on my past? disregarding the scope of this past chapter of my life, fighting for stage time through the persistence of my memories shuffling themselves through the forefront of my mind? how am i supposed to call it my past when it has an unrelenting grip on my present? is something really even in the past when the emotions rooted in it are commanding my present focus, my attention and care? when the love and the life and the unwavering gratitude are just as much a part of my days as the coffee i sip and the sun that spreads its warmth over my skin? when, four months after the fact, my body, each night, still forgets i won’t be waking up there?

i imagine reading all of this from an external perspective and some unknown force pokes at me, telling me to turn down the drama. but is it, dramatic? is the complexity of grappling with the closing out of the biggest chapter of my life to date, dramatic? are these emotions, dramatic? 

i know that it is still fresh. but i don’t know that i will ever stop mourning the passing of this period of my life. i can only hope that as time passes and other chapters unfold, the mourning of this one will slowly restructure itself into a nostalgia free from the grips of painful longing. that one day, a mellow, soothing affection will come over me as i step on a creaky floorboard that reminds me of the parts of my bedroom floor that spoke back to me. that one day, i will be the girl, absentmindedly staring out her window, smiling inwardly at the joy of her memories from her four scottish years.