Nostalgia is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have…
November 14, 2024
Perfect Night:
Fresh blowout from earlier that day
Music playing in the background that I like, but I am not on aux
Birds chirping
A dinner of steak, potato, and some veggie on the grill while it is nice outside – the sun is perpetually setting but not set
A game of monopoly where I win and get to yell, “Get fucked!” to someone I am passionately attracted to
A little ice cream action
Slow sleepy sex
Open windows while I (we) sleep.
I recently was chronicling what might be my perfect day. It was after I finished writing my list and read it back over that I realized this is not my hypothetical perfect day. I had experienced this day. Or, something almost identical to it. Inadvertently, I had recited closely action-for-action what I now perceive to have possibly been the best day of my life. What I would do to feel that once again is atrocious. Disgusting, in fact. Ravenous. Quite so.
Nostalgia is so disgusting and I am rather sick with it.
Fall makes me very nostalgic. I think Halloween is really hitting me in the gut this year. When I was young, my mom threw this massive Halloween party every year for my whole neighborhood and grade at school. It was, at that time, probably the best day of my life every single year, only topped by the next year’s more extravagant potluck pumpkin-carving contest trick-or-treat fiesta celebration. Getting dressed up in some cheaply-made wildy-expensive Party-City costume of a witch or a princess or Hannah Montana and going around with my other cats and bats to the houses in my neighborhood then dumping all the candy on the floor and setting up a candy black market operation to get rid of all the Almond Joys in my bag. I’m so sick I could throw up.
Now I just get dressed up in some stuff I bought off Amazon and plot which house-party to go to. Not that I don’t have fun doing that – I very much do. But nostalgia– I’m so sick I think I might throw up.
Walking down the street I get so wrapped up in it I think I might faint. Even writing this, I fear I might faint. The ironic thing about nostalgia is how skewed it is. Our minds are funny that way. There is an interesting chapter in Amanda Montell’s book The Age of Magical Thinking titled “Nostalgia Porn” in which she discusses the human propensity to remember positive experiences over negative experiences as time passes. Recalling a positive memory evokes far stronger emotions than recalling negative ones. The fading bias effect, as it is known in cognitive psychology (see, I do do some research for this blog), seems to rule my life most of the year, but especially so as October, Halloween, and my birthday roll around. We default to glorifying the past instead of encouraging ourselves toward the future.
In layman's terms, we look behind with rose colored glasses and look ahead with shit colored ones.
“Nostalgia Porn” is definitely the right term.
I feel like there is this spiritual weight of “the good-old-days” that is quite literally crushing me at all times. But, it is not a burden I mind bearing. In fact, I see it not as a burden at all. More of a blanket. A weighted blanket at that, but a blanket nonetheless.
I recently found myself reminiscing about the Northeastern dining hall. I was in class, one with a professor I had my freshman year as well, and I suddenly began to crave a Steast, said dining hall’s, breakfast. I remember sleepily walking in after my morning class to get an omelette, a bagel and a grapefruit every single morning. The excitement of my breakfast overwhelmed me for a brief moment until I realized I am not allowed in the dining halls anymore as a junior with no meal plan, as well as the inconvenient notion that I have food I need to eat at home.
I was listening to Pretty Boy by TV Girl a few days ago, one of my most listened to songs in 2023, and I became almost incapacitated by the memory of laying in my bed in the spring of my freshman year crying my eyes out silently to how beautiful and simple and meaningful the lyrics were and how much I felt them in my soul. And my first thought after this sweep of some kind of toxic endorphins was: Wow, I wish I could cry like that again. I wish I was naïve like that again. I wish I could Feel like that again. (This was notoriously one of the worst periods of my life.)
I regularly read my diary from my freshman year of college as if it was a novel about someone else. I can see everything written down vividly and from the third person. I can feel every snowflake and every tear and every touch and every cut as if it was happening in the moment. And I would have it no other way.
There is this photo of my dad and I drinking a mocha slush at Costco when I was around 7-years-old that my mom took. We are each drinking from our own straws from the same cup. I used to chew my straw so it was never difficult to differentiate mine from my dads. My mom doesn’t like coffee so she would either get a churro, a chocolate soft serve, or nothing and just watch us. I remember running around Costco looking for samples then reporting back to my parents what was good and what was not. I loved Costco.
This is so lame and boring because everyone is nostalgic about stuff that no one else cares about, I’m realizing now.
I’m so sick I am going to throw up.
I am nostalgic for going to Salem with my friend Elizabeth my freshman year of college and riding a bike up this ginormous hill in platform Dr. Martens loafers and a mini skirt to this view of this lighthouse and watching the sun set over the Halloween-town.
I am nostalgic for this freezing cold night where my roommate Lauren made us eat this abomination of a pickle she got off TikTok shop – the chamoy pickle – with sour candy, gushers, tajin, takis, a fruit roll, and a ton of red-40 up at our Northeastern apartment at the dining table where we video taped ourselves trying and reviewing it all together.
I am nostalgic for being in highschool and having nothing to do except go to Dairy Queen with my friends and sitting in our cars listening to music and gossiping about which boys we think are cute and which couples we hate and which characters in our friend group secretly urk us while eating a half-melted Oreo Blizzard and getting an insane stomach ache and coming home later than I said I would and definitely hearing about it in a “I’m not mad, I’m disappointed” way.
I am nostalgic for writing in my diary about my middle school boyfriend. I am nostalgic for my mom taking me to Paradise Bakery as a treat. I am nostalgic for listening to emo indie music exclusively when I was in the 11th grade. I am nostalgic for loving the rain. I am nostalgic for the Lil’est Pet Shops and Polly Pockets I used to chew on. I am nostalgic for Lorde. I am nostalgic for the boat. I am nostalgic for when my dad buzzed his hair and I cried. I am nostalgic for the fake diamond ring my mom used to put mini m&ms in as a surprise for me. I am nostalgic for walking off the plane onto the tarmac to see the brightest stars of my life while the instrumental portion of Venice Bitch by Lana del Rey played in my headphones. I am nostalgic for my stupid bangs. I am nostalgic for printing photos in my high school’s darkroom during class and not saying a word the whole time. I am nostalgic for my dorm room twin bed. I am nostalgic for getting a speeding ticket in Sedona. I am nostalgic for when I had not mastered eyeliner yet. I am nostalgic for the vlogs I used to post on YouTube that are now private. I am nostalgic for when my plant was healthy. I am nostalgic for my hometown coffee shop and their absolutely terrible service. I am nostalgic for my first Thanksgiving home from college. I am nostalgic for breaking up with my boyfriend and crying the whole 2-hour car ride home from Tucson. I am nostalgic for writing letters. I am nostalgic for reading Normal People for the first time. I am nostalgic for jealousy. I am nostalgic for hunger. I am nostalgic for a good fucking cry in my bed. I am nostalgic for fantasy. I am nostalgic for pain and I am nostalgic for passion. I am nostalgic for all the things I once held dear and all the things I have hated. I am nostalgic for feeling like a real human being but once again, have I ever? Felt that way? It is impossible to say with certainty.
It's like a 1950’s film that covers the precedent of the present and I am not complaining, although I know I should. The fading bias effect is really quite sweet, when you think of it. There seems to be no evolutionary explanation for it other than keeping us positive about where we came from.
My biggest issue is that I am far too positive about my past. So much so, that I have no clue how to handle my present. Nostalgia is like a suffocating cloud of warmth that silently engulfs you until you see nothing but a misty glowing light of unachievability. It smells amazing. It's poisonous. Venomous, really. As it kills from within.
I have been quite sick for some time. I cannot function, hardly. But –
To me, nostalgia is the most beautiful ailment of all.
I enter the rose garden at night except there are no roses and only tall grass which crunches under my feet. The mountains loom over me, sending the breeze against me only gently enough to blow my hair into my face, obscuring my view for a few moments at a time. I remember it like it was yesterday, except were there really no roses? I could swear there were. I hopped the fence into the garden to see the roses and capture the roses but it seems I am not the one with the camera nor the pencil nor the pen. Time passes as time present fills my lungs secretly and the dust from the road floats through me to remind me of the gravity of how I feel. All I can see and feel is the glow, of which seems to be emanating from my chest and exposing the tall tall grass and the fence and the lake under the mountain. I take a few steps and feel the crunch under my feet but do not hear it. I light a fire as the sun fades away and all that is left is the glow of the flame. But the fire illuminates nothing. Only the glow. And it is everything I want to see.