nostalgia
ISSUE #2
2023
FICTION / ESSAY / POETRY
A collection of literature centering BIPOC, LGBTQ and disabled writers
NOTE FROM THE EDITOR
Dear Mortals,
Nostalgia can punch you in the face, or nostalgia can sneak up on you when you least expect it, like a smell on a friend’s wrist. We often think of nostalgia as a pleasant experience, a longing in our hearts for good times, but I’ve felt nostalgia for periods of turmoil just as so. Perhaps, us mortals feel a compulsion to memorialize the beautiful (fucked up) things that happen to us because when we do, we know we are alive. Nostalgia is a delightful kind of mourning. Take heed, though, not to get stuck in it. Recount the dead days behind you, but always be hunting for new fresh life, and the cycle will continue with joy.
Love,
Amani Hope
Contents
The Box
by Kanisha DiCicco, Fiction
By The Way, It’s Winter
by Swati Sudarsan, Poetry
Spilled Milk
by Edidiong Essien, Fiction
Albion
by Eirinie Carson, Fiction
Sunlight triumvirate
by Yazmin Bradley, Poetry
the interloper
by Raquel Alvarado, Fiction
Peerage, and more
by Isra Hassan, Poetry
THROUGH THE MIDNIGHT STREETS
by Briana Soler, Essay
The Box
by Kanisha DiCicco, Fiction
Kanisha DiCicco has been an avid reader and writer since she could hold a book and a pencil. She lives in Miami because, as a Pisces, she's most at peace surrounded by water. For more musings, you can find her at La Vie en Prose, coming soon.
My trip to Paris, like most women in their early 20s who attended film school and felt an air of superiority due to a vast knowledge of New Wave films and the ability to point out a Giacometti sculpture, was fueled by a desire to live in the city of great artists.
A month's stay was all I could afford with the money I made working at the local coffee shop and taking photos of graduates–or newly engaged couples who got their dream of a ring by spring. It would turn out that a month was all I needed to change my life completely.
He was sitting on a park bench reading a classic piece of literature, smoking a cigarette. I couldn’t have penned a better male main character in my Parisian fantasies if I tried. I was a painfully American girl trying to find her way around with broken French and eyes glued to a map. A pigeon scared me, and I tripped, falling to my knees. He helped me pick up my things and assured me that it wasn’t as embarrassing as it felt.
To this day, I have the scar to serve as a reminder of meeting him that day, and I cry sometimes when I see it.
I saved everything, and I do mean everything, from the moment we met and put those items into a box. Call it delusion or love at first sight (aren’t they the same thing?), but I knew this would be someone and a time in my life I would never want to forget.
The sticker from an art gallery opening that we stumbled upon shortly after meeting in the Sorbonne courtyard. A restaurant menu from a place that gave me food poisoning. The cork from the bottle of cheap red wine we finished along the Seine right before he kissed me for the first time. A mixtape of indie French pop songs that he perfectly curated for me. The love letter he slipped into my suitcase where he planned out the rest of our lives together and begged me to leave Paris.
The box is the only reason I know he existed. Tangible evidence that that month spent with him wasn't a surrealist fever dream. I didn’t hear from him again, despite many heartfelt emails and WhatsApp messages. Years have passed, and the box is tucked away under my bed while the thoughts of him remain cemented in my brain.
I found what I was looking for in Paris. Heartbreak has been my greatest muse.
By the way, it’s Winter
by Swati Sudarsan, Poetry
Swati Sudarsan is the 2023 recipient of the Bread Loaf Conference Katharine Bakeless Nason Award in Fiction, and she has received support from Tin House, the Kenyon Review, Kweli Journal, and Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Her work has appeared in McSweeney's, Catapult, Denver Quarterly and more. She went to University of Michigan, and lives in Oakland, CA, where she works as a public health scientist.
Swooping in like a blanket, snuffing out grass
I’m weak thinking that if I just went back
to sleep I’d wake up to yesterday, the world just
as it was. The next season still approaching.
Look, my eyeballs are frozen. No, embalmed.
Yesterday the lawn was all green blades, fresh cut.
It’s suffocating under Winter and I could cry about it
but my eyes are cracked. Poor grass. I would blink
a prayer for the grass. It’s fucked, what’s happening.
Seasons were never crueler than this morning. I know
because my body is a season. My body’s been a flower,
been cut grass, even been a lawn mower. I’m stuck
to my window and I remember that my body’s been
rain, everywhere and then gone. Oh god, there was
rain in the gutter and it killed the neighbor’s dog.
By the way, it’s Winter and I’m fucked. I’m still loving
on rain when I might rot in frost. Every season is the
wrong one. I’m re-thinking, what can kill a dog?
spilled milk
by Edidiong Essien, Fiction
Edidiong Uzoma Essien, is a Nigerian writer and digital marketing professional living on the U.S. East Coast. She has been previously published in Brittle Paper. Essien enjoys reading, creating content for her book review page here, playing video games, and surrendering herself to the whims of her 3-year-old cat.
Eleven years old is young enough to enjoy fever-dreamlike Sunday morning cartoons, iridescent plots in sickening shades of tangerine and rouge. The hidden thread embroidered into the fabric of Ginika’s favourite television shows is overstimulation, and it does its job well. By the time the first advertisement rolls around, her brain is foldless, just how she likes it when both her parents are home.
She is old enough to understand infidelity. It is a big word for not-quite-teen lips, but she relishes its taste mingling with her morning breath. Infidelity is a dirty word, yes, dirtier than Fuckface and ekwensu . She can spell it out in her sleep, forward and backward at the snap of a finger. Infidelity. Ytiledifni. It curls up inside the conch of her ear when the television is on, sleeping through the antics of Aku and Wayne Cramp. As soon as she clicks the remote’s mute button, the word blooms.
Her stomach is doing that vortex thing again. She places the back side of her hand against her forehead. Clammy. Maybe her mother will let her eat breakfast on the sofa. She tests her theory. Nne? She calls out, dampening the brightness in her voice to really sell her purported ill spirits.
There is no movement in the bowels of the house, their kitchen. Mother is away, so Ginika will play. She tosses the remote control aside and skips to the kitchen, stomach ache already forgotten. What sort of breakfast is she feeling like, she asks herself? Oats and evaporated milk? Leftover yam and corned beef stew? A single boiled egg? The possibilities are endless. She pokes her head into the fridge, sterile light washing out her round face. Something has gone off. Her nose follows the rotten smell until she finds what it is coming from: the can of milk she planned on drenching oats in.
The vortex humming inside her gathers steam and swells into an irate, more robust maelstrom. These days it is becoming harder to placate herself. Cartoons and illicit breakfasts can only do so much. She plunges her hand into the fridge and in a sweeping motion empties the top shelf onto the kitchen’s tiles. The sound of crashing milk cans and produce doesn’t wake her father. He is ‘under the weather’ which is adult-speak for ‘wants to be left alone with his blinds drawn and ears plugged.’
Ginika addresses the pool of milk forming at her bare feet, “Why’d you have to spoil my perfect morning?”
It doesn’t answer her. Milk cannot talk, much less spilled milk.
The mess she has made is a manageable one. She is able to banish the evidence of her pointless tantrum with a mop and three generous spritzes of Lysol. She picks up fallen aubergines, other unlucky victims/witnesses of the tantrum, and polishes their purple bodies on her nightgown before returning them to the fridge. Only one is bruised. The empty milk cans go into the recycling tub under the sink next. Everything is as it was.
In her ear, the word continues to cackle and whine, mocking her babyish nature. “You’re eleven years old Ginika,” she chides herself, embarrassed by her lack of composure. Eleven and a quarter, the word corrects her. No wonder your mummy can’t stand being in this stuffy house with you and that man.
“Not true,” she mumbles. “It’s just an awkward time. Every family has growing pains.”
She is parroting what her mother whispers into her scalp when they cuddle at bedtime. Growing pains. She imagines the three of them lashed together from forehead to sternum to ankles. Poor mummy, she thinks. It must be rather painful to grow that way, tied to a silly baby and the man upstairs.
The man upstairs is a bigger bellyacher than Ginika is, all mopes and sighs like that stupid donkey from Hundred Acres Wood. He makes a gurgling sound in his throat when he cries. She’s tried to mimic that noise when no one is listening but hasn’t mastered the right pitch yet. What an odd contrast he cuts against her mother. Her mum isn’t exactly like the other mothers she knows. Ginika’s is a sentient beam of sunshine forced into a meatbag. When she squints and tilts her head almost ninety degrees, she can see the light leaking out of her mother’s nail beds and gums. It is subtle, but present. She wonders if her father can see the faint pulses too, but doubts it. He only sees one thing: betrayal.
Ginika leaves the kitchen with an empty stomach. She hits the mute button once more and fixes a dopey smile on her face, relieved when the sounds of frenetic hijinks permeate the living room. How lucky she is to have her impenetrable universe in one boxy package. The cartoons, eager to please her, wrestle that dirty word into meek submission. She is, for a moment, safe from the images of her howling father and laughing mother.
Albion
by Eirinie Carson, Fiction
Eirinie Carson is a Black British Londoner and writer living in California. She is a mother of two children, a member of the Writers Grotto in San Francisco, and a frequent contributor to Mother magazine, with her work appearing in The Sonora Review and more. The release of her first book, The Dead Are Gods (from Melville House, 2023) was a critically acclaimed Spring release, with Oprah Daily, Shondaland, People Magazine and the Washington Post. Eirinie is currently working on her second book.
Somewhere up the coast of northern California, between the redwooded mountains and the ocean, I am being driven by a man I have just met, down roads I do not know.
This man has just fixed my rental car and I am grateful, grateful and stupid because I don’t know why I am in this car. The smart version of me would not be in this car. But this current version is the one that made the choice, and she is distrustful yet polite. He had wanted to go for a test drive, he said. He’d never driven a sports car like it. Hop in! And so she hopped in. The man, who is at least 20 years older than me and a good few inches shorter, is not a physical threat. I work out, I can run. I even imagine running, alongside the road and then into the forest but this is not an area I am familiar with, I could get lost or trip or turned around or step off one of the very many cliffs this part of the coast is known for. My thoughts turn to Sarah Everard, but I look away. I can’t think of her right now.
The man tells me, as he drives 60mph down S shaped roads, about his wife’s upcoming mastectomy. He asks if I would have one, or two breasts lopped off. If I had to choose. If I had to. Because you can still get aroused from one. He gropes at his own chest, imagining. I look at the door, which is locked. I remember a fork beneath my seat from an earlier salad, ones I was gifted from my wedding registry. I could stab someone with it, I think. Probably, if I had to. He tells me more about breast tissue, about sensitivity, implants. He scolds me to make sure I check my own breasts, get myself checked out once in a while. My hands are in my lap, like a good girl. I am scared but I push push push it away, because if I feel it, I may do something stupid, like leap out of the car while it is still moving. He pulls over to the side of the road and I think, if it happens now, I must be ready. I widen my eyes; I covertly look around. I will find a neighbour, I will flag down a car, I will scream like my mother taught me when I was a little girl, “I DO NOT KNOW THIS MAN!”
But he is just flipping around, taking me back. The relief floods down my spine like a shiver, but I do not relax. I will not relax until I am out of this car. He changes the subject, talks about his daughters. I wonder how he would feel if one of them were in my place. The engine roars, guttural and threatening.
He grins.
We get back into town and I begin to feel silly. What was I afraid of? He pulls into his garage where his workers look up warily. I smile brightly, I want them to see me through the window and know I am ok, know that I didn’t do anything, nothing happened. I get out and pay him the cash I withdrew from an ATM so that he wouldn’t have to pay taxes on it, an under the table job. He smiles, because it was an easy way to make a buck. He opens the door to his office, waves me in. I hesitate.
He’s just a dad, he’s just a husband, he’s just a mechanic. He’s just a guy who didn’t know. I would like to tell him stories, stories of women who have been in situations that seemed benign but quickly became dangerous. I would like to tell him about Sarah, Sarah who I think about often, who was also trapped in a car with a man she did not know, a man capable of doing excruciating, terrible things. As all men are. I would like to tell him the stories I tell myself, so that I can step out of the door in the morning, drop my children at school. It was probably nothing, it was just a joke, it wasn’t supposed to hurt, what are you so afraid of?
Sunlight Triumvirate
by Yazmin Bradley
Born and raised in Western Sydney on unceded Dharug Land to working class parents, Yazmin holds a double degree in International Relations and Media Screen & Sound Production from UNSW. Her career history is in Australian feature films, libraries and Western Sydney events & festivals. She is currently pursuing her Master of Creative Writing with Macquarie University.
I
Hot terracotta
pooling onto cobbled streets
and oiled canvas.
Cicadas baste themselves in
drippings of pan fat sunset.
I I
A burnt-out light bulb
from a late-night kebab shop
sputtering weakly.
Too proud to show its lined face
except to old grey pigeons.
I I I
Blue like whalefall
on a blood-stained sky
seeking cool eucalyptus.
The laugh of kookaburras
warns you’ve gone the wrong way.
The Interloper
by Raquel Alvarado
Raquel Alvarado writes Solitary Daughter, a newsletter on Substack. She lives in the Canadian prairies.
That first night, in the karaoke bar, yes, even then, we must have already looked like old friends, not new lovers. A few days later I brought him a book for his birthday as I did with every boy I loved. I had practiced writing a nonchalant inscription seven times before committing it to the first page, but I still made a mistake when I signed my name, using letters from his instead. I served cake to all of his friends and I beamed as he opened his gift and read my inscription aloud. He texted another girl all night while I charmed his friends into loving me. We lingered at the doorframe as we saw everyone out and I waved as though it was my home too. Before he could speak to send me away I led him to bed and asked him to be rough. I kissed his neck when he finished and as we laid there he told me he’d finally met the marrying kind, and oh was she sweet. She’d never let him do to her what he just did to me.
In a few years, I’ll message him that I’m in town for the weekend. He’ll arrive at my hotel in his vintage sedan, clanging his wheels against the curb as he slows because he’s too busy looking for me. As we drive I’ll open the window to the balmy night air and I’ll wonder whether he told his wife why he won’t be home tonight. He’ll drone on about his car and I’ll wonder why I thought being his secret would feel sexy when really it just feels pathetic. He won’t look at me, so I’ll take my phone out and start scrolling through our old text messages, all the way back to that picture he took of me on our first morning together. I’m drinking coffee on his couch, where he’s caught me mesmerized by the vertiginous view. My hair is curly and wet from our shower and I’m wearing his hoodie and sweatpants. After he takes the picture he lifts me into his arms and says, Wow, you look just like me. And we begin again.
Selected poems
by Isra Hassan
Isra Hassan is a Black poet from Minneapolis. Her work can be found in Guernica, Poet Lore, Poetry Online, The Waterstone Review, and elsewhere. Her debut manuscript was a finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry & Poetics Book Prize. She resides in Washington, D.C. www.israhassan.art
In Sight
Like when vocabulary first met sound, whisper to me all that we are about to find.
Pry pretentious prizes
from the palms of purpling
people posing among
the populace, standing
as pillars of pride.
In union, and in layers,
pride stands above
praise, a singular praise,
that perches above
a penniless, pained
prominence.
Peerage
TEARDROPS THAT SAY INSHALLAH
O’dear / how is it that you have abandoned / aqueducts / my friend / i get graced with rain / showers / everyday / meeting the land / of no resistance / i don’t mind / nature’s ablution
THROUGH THE MIDNIGHT STREETS
by Briana Soler
Briana is a writer and photographer based out of Houston, TX. You can find Briana on Instagram at @bribeatris and on Substack at Selected Chronicles.
A few years ago I sold my orange chair and bookshelf made of metal milk crates I got at Boston’s SOWA Market to somebody on Facebook marketplace in Houston. I hesitated for a minute before selling it because then all I would have left from my time living in Boston would be my memories–scraps of paper, movie ticket stubs, photos, and T stubs. I was only there for two and a half years, but after moving back to Houston, I could feel myself speaking generously of my time away. I kept rounding up whenever someone asked me how long I lived there as if the only way to justify my love for Boston was if I had stayed longer. How can numbers measure the intensity of one's life? How can numbers hold the weight of meaning? Two and a half years on paper is such a small fraction of my life, but what it stood for was immensely larger. I held onto my time in Boston as the marker for everything else. “I moved back 2 years ago.” “This Christmas was hot, last year I was in snow.” How far I had gone in life and how far I had come turned into the tip of the iceberg in my head. I saw snow a few days after moving there. It felt otherworldly, a glistening white omen of all the magic there was to come. My leaving felt like a betrayal.
I fell in love with Hayden one summer when he was home in Houston for summer break. Three months later he proposed and I said yes, then he asked me to move up to Boston with him while he finished college, and I said yes again. Boston became my whole universe then, and it felt like it was our job to explore every crevice of it. It held the beginnings of our relationship, the beginnings of our twenties, the beginnings of what felt like freedom. On our last day there, when we loaded up the Penske moving truck with the last of our belongings, my heart broke. I felt empty. I felt stupid for loving a place so much, for being scared of leaving it, for having to say goodbye. I looked out of the passenger window at Burbank Street one last time, I tried to imprint the grey and white building in my head as it stood. I could still see the characters we were a week ago, sitting on the stoop eating apples and peanut butter, people watching. I let a few more tears roll down my face as Hayden pulled the Penske out onto Hemenway Street, and then I didn’t look back again.
When I first moved to Boston in 2013 I was secretly living in Hayden’s dorm room at Berklee College of Music. He had won a dorm lottery for a single room, so we took our chances while we found me an apartment. A few weeks later, we found a listing on Craigslist just a street away from Hayden's dorm so we went to take a look at it. It was a walk-up apartment complex with steep stairs and the unit was on the fourth floor, the top floor. It was unit #28, my birthday number, another sign I thought. The room I was looking at was originally the living room, with bay windows that faced the street, it was perfect.
I signed the lease in the backseat of my landlord's car. His name was Charles and he liked that my dad was from Argentina, he started telling me stories about how Argentinians are and that I am probably just like them. I listened to him describe me, a stranger in his back seat who he knew nothing about. He gave me a copy of the lease, keys, and mailbox key and drove off. I was officially living in Boston.
My roommates were an international couple that went to Berklee–Yunyun from Taiwan and Mischa from Uzbekistan. The first day I met my roommates I was with Hayden and they invited us into their room. Mischa showed us on the map where Uzbekistan was. He was towering over all of us, to what seemed like 7 feet tall, and YunYun was smaller than me, maybe 5 feet. Their room was packed from floor to ceiling with boxes of things. She was an audio engineer and he played the upright bass. They were always making music, always cooking, always smiling. I didn’t choose them as roommates, they came with the apartment, having already lived there a few years, but I am glad my first experience with roommates was with them. I got used to all of their movements around the apartment, even if we never really talked, I still felt close to them.
Two years in, I ran into them in the mailroom. “We’re getting married!” They said to me with excitement. “What!? Right now!? Oh my God! Where?” I asked them. “Yes. Right now! At the courthouse!” He was wearing a funny 70s-looking suit and she was in a funky ensemble of mixed prints. It was the most untraditional getup for a wedding, but anything else would have been out of place. I have always admired their style. Later that evening I was feeling lonely in my room and writing in my journal when I heard a knock at my bedroom door. It was my newlywed roommates. They offered me a drink and a chicken leg to celebrate their getting married. We drank Baileys and ate standing in the kitchen, with little to say to each other after all these years. I felt guilty that I was the one sharing this experience, this moment with them, but they reminded me that they were so far from home, and without saying so much, I was all they had at that moment. And in a way, it was sort of perfect. After we finished our drinks they said they had to go Facetime their families and I was left alone in the kitchen with half a cup of Baileys. Alone, but a little less lonely. I don't know which moment it was that I thought I would never leave Boston, was it this moment that I vowed I would never leave this city?
I turn on Ribs by Lorde as I sit down to write this essay. It’s one of the songs I put on when I want to float back into another time of my life, a time that seemed like life was saturated with living–making mistakes, making revelations, experiencing new feelings–perhaps it was just saturated with youth. The first time I heard this album I was taking promotional photos for a Berklee student named Riley. I had shot Riley a few times and was developing a friendship with her. She was a singer–spunky, bold, and freer than anyone I knew back home. She was from North Carolina. She said she would never move back home. She said she hated it there. She said she was destined for New York. We were in her apartment, and she was getting ready, singing “Royals” by Lorde. I sat on the bed and watched as she put on her makeup and sang along as if I was not there. I was entranced by her confidence. She asked if I had heard of Lorde. I said no. “What? Oh my God, you need to listen to her album immediately. It’s so fucking good.” I silently nodded and made a mental note to check it out later. Fast forward a few weeks later, one of the songs from that album would come on in my headphones as I was walking somewhere, and I would cross my jacket tighter against my chest as a gust of freezing wind blew by, and I would hit repeat. I was 21 and life felt so impossible and freeing. I was afraid and excited in the same sentence, I was equally inspired and sad. I held onto Lorde’s words like they were gold. I was mourning my childhood, my adolescence, and hopeful for my future. Maybe I have become nostalgic for what I imagined life would be then. The dreams of our youth seem to haunt us until we are ready to let go. “It feels so scary getting old.”
Sometimes the memories come in flashes, a smell, or when the weather drops, or the cadence of someone saying something can bring me back to Boston nights. Endless nights of running through the streets tipsy on wine with friends, with Hayden and his friends as we try not to pee from laughing. Street lights lit up the city, we all looked to the Prudential Tower to know which way was home, weekly night walks to the theatre as we ran past the reed fens, daring each other to go in them amid the rumors of what lies deep in the reeds. Rain, sun, or snow, we were always running through the midnight streets. I don’t think any of us thought those days would end.
~
Three years ago, I was driving back from Maine to fly out of Boston and was only there for a night. I was nervous to be back in that city. I had not looked back since I left it years before, and there I was on Newbury Street again. I found myself in step with everyone’s pace and the memories came alive. I laughed when I saw the familiar sight of the half-naked painter outside of Sonsie. It was comforting to know some things never change, despite the Forever 21 and Urban Outfitters I used to frequent were no longer there. I bought my first film camera at that Urban Outfitters, a little Lomo camera. I found familiarity in those big name-brand stores, a solace from suburbia in Houston. I felt a knot form at the pit of my stomach as I walked up to Berklee College of Music. I had spent so many days in their library, their computer rooms, hanging out in the halls, in the dorms, in the cafeteria, all over. Now, I watched all the new students coming and going, how young they all looked, and how out of place I felt. I was scanning the faces for familiar ones. I thought maybe I would recognize someone, see an old acquaintance amongst the crowd of these young strangers, but no luck. I saw ghosts of Hayden's friends, versions of us eating pizza, and hanging around, laughing ‘til our ribs hurt.
~
A month ago, Hayden and I cleared out our storage unit where I had a 3-foot by 3-foot gold frame which I stuck a bunch of old Polaroids from Boston when we first moved back. It moved with us from apartment to apartment in Houston, but things got crowded and I put it in storage. “What should we do with it?” I asked when we were met with it once again. He shrugged. We stuck it in our home again and left it in the entryway for a while. For some reason I was unable to get rid of it, unable to sell even the frame. “What if I hung it up again?” I asked Hayden. “Yeah, but, the photos are so old. Can’t you put something new in the frame?” He said. I guess I was trying to hold onto a version of us that has since evolved. I was sad he didn’t want it up as it was, hurt even, but then I looked at the photos closer. There were his friends in the dorms, the dorm room that he would rearrange every few weeks, where he would set up his practice pads, annoyed that he had to take his actual drums down to the basement and set them up in the practice rooms if he wanted to play them. He had a locker downstairs too with some drums but he always wanted everything he was actively playing to be in his room. I understood that sentiment. I would hate having half of my books in some basement somewhere. There were photos of old trips, photos of our dog named Gordy which Hayden got me for our second anniversary, and photos of Fenway Park where we walked nearly every day with Gordy. For so many of them I could remember the exact moment Hayden snapped the photo. But he was right, it was like a shrine of the past, a giant frame that told the world this is who we were 10 years ago, but who were we now? So I took the frame apart one random sunny day and peeled the Polaroid images off, studying them, flipping them over to read the notes Hayden wrote, and storing them away with the rest of our Polaroids. By the time I was done, it felt like a weight lifted off me. It felt nice not having the past breathing down our backs.
I was writing this essay when one of Hayden's friends, Josh, from college came to visit. He was on tour with Peter Gabriel and they were playing their last show in Houston, so he asked to see us. I was nervous because I anticipated being sad when I saw him. I was nervous to see the past, a glimpse of a time so far gone. Nostalgia in the flesh. I wrapped him up in a past world in my mind, and there he stayed. The image that I froze in my head was of a bunch of nineteen and twenty-year-old boys playing their instruments, Josh playing the trumpet, Hayden playing the drums, and the rest of their band Walker Road crammed in a small bedroom. The weekend came and went, and I was relieved to find that seeing somebody from a place of nostalgia did not hurt at all. Instead, it made me happy and made me realize I had been doing that memory a disservice by not allowing it to grow. I had made taxidermies of everyone from the past, wanting to keep everyone exactly as I remembered them, but the live version is always better than something stuffed and artificial.
I ordered a 3 piece chicken box at Raising Canes tonight and the smell of it sends me back to high school when they first opened a location nearby, and then I am reminded of the time I found one in Boston, right next to the Goodwill. It was a slice of heaven, a comfort; I felt like I was home when I was there. As I am going through an old plastic bin with Boston memories I find postcards from Houston, things I would hang on my wall to create a sense of comfort and stability, I wanted parts of it to surround me. I am in disbelief when I find them. Did I really forget all that? When I look back on the journals of my time there I realize I was lonely and homesick for my family and adolescence and what had become my comfort zone. I look back on what the twenty-three-year-old version of me wrote, and how everything I thought was true when I wrote it is now no longer true. The past does not make liars of us, but the past makes obsolete versions of us. Hayden and I fought a lot that first year, there was so much to get to know about each other, and we were so young. So what was I nostalgic for at that time? Maybe the possibilities of what could be? Maybe despite the bad fights, there was so much more good that didn't get written down. I went to Boston for love after all, to be with Hayden, to follow the magic of the snow. I left for love too. To be with the little family we cultivated, me Hayden, and Gordy. I left because I trusted Hayden, because it was time to return to family, because it was time to build something away from what Boston gave us. Boston changed my life. But I’ve been so focused on my romanticism for Boston all these years that I forget that it's just a cycle that keeps running. One day I know I'll be longing for this place I am in now, this age, this memory.
Are we all nostalgic for our early twenties? Nobody cared about anything in our early twenties other than having as much fun as possible. I used to say I wanted to suck the marrow out of life's bones. And maybe simply, I have this deep connection to all of this because it was a time I knew that was limited. I knew it wouldn't be forever so I gave it my whole soul.
~
I am listening to “Still Sane” by Lorde again as I write this. “I’m not in the swing of things, but what I really mean is, not in the swing of things yet.” I remember tearing up as I would listen to this, singing it quietly to myself back then. Now, I sing silently as I stare into space at my living room walls I painted blue, with a blue Ralph Lauren lamp on the end table. I can see Squid Games on the TV through the mirror that Hayden is watching. We are not the people in this essay anymore, we are not the people in Boston anymore. We are better, more mature versions of those people. The girl in Boston all those years ago was trying to get her footing in the world, she thought Boston would save her and take her on to her dream city, NYC. I didn't get to NYC, but I did get my footing. That girl was desperate to have everything figured out, to be happy, to have a clear direction. She would be happy to know that I am in the swing of things now.
