Nostalgia Has Good Bones

Smash mouth already covered it but here we are

Diary Entry- 2021 

Nostalgia is a means of forgetting, I think, even though it feels like remembering. I look back on my life and I know I’m watching a highlight reel; the past is rose tinted. I know the monotony of everyday life—the routines, the boredom—is missing from my rearview mirror. And that’s why the past seems so enticing, why old homes and friends and lovers feel more welcoming.

Time has rounded out their edges and softened their teeth; their words are echoes that ring but never land. I can hear them, but not quite. And even as I write this, I’m sure one day I’ll stumble across this page again and something in my core will long for where I sit right now, like the palpable tension between two magnets that never truly touch. Even now, as I sit in this present moment under fluorescent lights and listen to the muffled small talk around me, I feel the touch of my future self, longing to come back to me. She knows me better than she knows herself, and I know nothing of her.

…

Yes, my diary entries are always this poetic and introspective and wistful. I also have zero unread emails, have never stubbed a toe, and can bench press a small (probably European) car. 

Just kidding! Emails rarely find me well because they struggle to find me at all, and more often than not my diary entries are boring, factual accounts of my days—went to work, got groceries, trapped a spider under a mug, and so on—followed by an inevitable three month hiatus. (I’m not sure about the bench-pressing-a-small-European-car-thing. I’ve never tried.)

But this diary entry from a few years ago is unique, and I revisit it often.  

It was late, and I was in one of the cramped, windowless study rooms of my college library working on procrastinating finishing a term paper. The library was that quiet kind of loud where every miniscule sound is magnified. Shuffling papers, clicking keyboards, coughs, sniffles. I was anxious to be somewhere else, but couldn’t figure out where I wanted to be. I didn’t want to go home; I didn’t want to finish my paper. What I wanted, I finally decided, was to be in another time entirely. I wanted to go home, but I wanted “home” to be my childhood bedroom.

This was during the end of my final fall semester, and when I finally put aside my term paper to scrawl that entry in my journal, I knew only a few things for certain: 

1. I had no idea what I was going to do after graduation.

2. I was scared for the future. 

3. I missed being a kid. 

The waxy smell of crayons; the roughness of a warm sidewalk beneath my bare feet. It washed over me unexpectedly, but when I tried to hold onto it it disappeared, like how glow-in-the-dark stars glued to a ceiling only seem to be visible when you don’t look directly at them. So, I sat there in the library, a whole entire adult, trying to conjure a feeling that was more invention than memory. 

But above all else, above all the stomach knots and cuticle picking, I was aware that I was in the midst of a fleeting period of life where my unstructured future was ahead of me, ripe and limitless. I knew no matter what it held, no matter how happy or unhappy I found myself eventually, a little piece of me would always miss exactly where I was at that moment, just as my present self missed the hot sidewalks of my childhood summers. 

Nostalgia has a hopeful, benevolent grasp on me. It’s a great feeling. It’s a heartbreaking feeling. And yet, I think being explicitly nostalgic is the best outlook we can hope for. Who doesn’t want to look back on their life and remember things as better than they were? To recall their past selves with tenderness and soft eyes? At the very least, it’s better than the alternative. 

But nostalgia is counterintuitive to preservation. The only way to truly preserve a memory is to leave it alone; each time we recall the past we taint it. Our neural pathways are irreversibly rerouted—a smudge of each recollection is left behind until the original memory risks being entirely rewritten. Each time I remember crashing my bike or blowing out candles, the storyline shifts beneath my feet. 

I reminisce anyway; I scroll through my camera roll, reread diary entries, stalk myself on social media, listen to old music, and smell my old perfumes, just to feel a quick reminder of what once was. The past is a scab that I refuse to let heal, because that would require letting it go. 

What I’m trying to say is something redundant. Something that Smash Mouth already perfectly articulated in their 1999 hit single All Star: The years start comin’ and they don’t stop comin’. 

My little brother graduated from high school yesterday. I have a 9-5 and two small creases in my forehead. People keep getting married and having babies and my most recent google searches are, “how long does it take to forget a language,” “how to stop being late to things” and “anti-aging skincare routine.” And with each passing year I understand more why adults always lament how quickly things change. I understand the kitschy, unclaimed mug in the breakroom of my office that reads, “The days are long, but the years are short!” 

And I don’t necessarily have this figured out. The fear is always there. I’m constantly aware of the grains of sand trickling through my hourglass. I’m constantly worried about forgetting things. But the anecdote, or at least the morphine, for my fear of the future is a heaping dose of nostalgia. A comforting reminder that I’ll find a way to romanticize whatever my life looks like right now once I miss it. Hindsight may be 20/20, but her lenses are rose tinted. 

I don’t expect nostalgia to show me things as they were. Rather, she helps me make peace with the past. Nostalgia delivers my lost friends, mistakes, aspirations, and fears to me in a neat package; they become easier to stomach. Time offers grace to people I was once angry with—after all, we were very young when we knew each other better. Resentment, pain, grudges, they all wash away with time and distance. The wrinkles in my brain reshape rapids into calm rivers with each fond reminiscion. 

My past self was right when she wrote that she could feel the touch of her future self longing to come back to her—I do frequently. The cycle spins on. Fibonacci’s spiral deepens. As I write this now someone else reaches out towards me. She reassures me that I’ll be just fine.