nostalgia in all its sneaky ways

I am prone to nostalgia.

I hear the opening moments to Elements by A Fine Frenzy, and I’m back on the train to Connecticut on a family trip. I look at old photos of blue mountains and early morning sunrises, and I ache. Nostalgia comes quietly, but she keeps coming.

There’s something about being in my mid-twenties. In my younger days, I envisioned a life that was perfect by 25. Now I find it laughable that I ever thought I could accomplish so much by that time. Everyone moves at their own pace. Some lives seem to get together quicker than others.

I ache because I look back and it all felt so simple. The worries were fewer. Less about student loans and relatives getting old, more about wondering if the guy I liked liked me back or if I was going to do well on an assignment. Adulthood is a fearsome place. There are no real rules here. Yet some are winning. 

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I hated high school. It felt so limiting when all I wanted was to expand. I felt stuck in a life and in a place that I was ready to move on from. And yet when I hear John the Ghost sing She wished we could live different lives…but who would really want to? I’d honestly love to go back and visit that version of myself. She had so much to learn, but there’s a lightness to her that I just don’t have anymore.

Is nostalgia a certain sickness? If so, does anyone have an antidote? There’s just a quiet sadness and longing in it. 

From here on out, you’ll keep on losing things. So get used to it. John the Ghost.

When it comes to high school, I feel these Paramore lyrics deep in my bones: I romanticize even the worst of times when all it took to make me cry was being alive.” Perhaps I’m incapable of fully living in the here and now. Part of me will always ponder the past or fear the future. 

Who are we without our memories? I have a relative with Alzheimer’s and it’s scary to see how much you lose when you lose memory. She’s still full of energy and quick to tell you how she feels, but there’s so much I’ll never get to know about her. 

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Is nostalgia inherently sad? Can I look back and delight in that time, but feel gratitude? The sound of Crave by Paramore seems to say yes. “What if I told her that now that I’m older, there isn’t a moment I’d wanna change.”

Little flashes of the past are tinged with gold on its edges. 

A Fine Frenzy. She doesn’t make music anymore. Her old song Think of You makes me think of an old crush who I haven’t heard anything about in years. The circles darkened around our eyes. Does age do that to us? Are we a bit distorted from the weight of life on our bodies?

I am much too young to be nostalgic, and yet there seems to me that there was an inherently better time. Perhaps that’s the draw of childhood. As they say, youth is wasted on the young. If nostalgia is a color, it’s navy blue. It’s that shade of the sky when everything gets darker and deeper. 

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I am surprised at times at how much I do remember, and it’s the remembering that induces such a longing to return. I suppose someday the days I’m living in will be the good old days. And I am lucky. I am not troubled by much. I wonder about the path I’m on, and where I’m headed, but I’m not living with regret, just curiosity on how I will one day spend my days.

I crave a time where things made more sense than they do now. But life is forever incomprehensible. As you witness the maybe two of the things God is doing, there is so much more you haven’t noticed. 

Music more than anything, for me, brings me back to the past. And so, it’s quite essential for there to be a playlist along with this post. I place it here below to enjoy at your leisure. I hope you’re not so much haunted by the past, as you have found some time to appreciate all that’s gone by.

Nostalgia playlist:

• Crave by Paramore
• A World Without by A Fine Frenzy
• Red House by John the Ghost
• Young by Parachute
• Lost in Nostalgia by The Maine
• (Un)Lost by The Maine

Signing off,

Gigi