Nostalgia is kicking my butt.
Long, hard thoughts on nostalgia to follow.
When I showed up to the airport last, last Friday - weaving in, out, and around the snaking TSA line - Corinne Bailey Rae’s and Norah Jones’s voices floated in, out, and around the space too - killing me (softly) with feelings unidentifiable as bitter or sweet. Just the day before I’d received an unexpected text from one of the people I’ve known longest in my world. Maybe there’s something about a Thursday that predisposes me to emotional swirl, but I almost teared up in my cubicle after reading her message and reminiscing on life once lived in tandem with hers.
My heart is aching for my circa 2006 life when “Like A Star” sounded seamless in my day to day (despite having no frame of reference for the lyrics) and the friends, who by now have earned the title “old friend”, were fixtures in that day to day, too. Life, apparently, is moving very quickly.
I can remember pumping my legs furiously on the swings with one such old friend during the final weeks of second grade. Third grade would follow and after that, as the indomitable Class of ’06, we’d be moving on to new schools. As we pushed and pumped and pushed to see if it was actually possible to flip over the top of the swings, we contemplated our futures. Life was moving quickly, and we recognized it even then.
So how do you revisit those too fast moments, indulging in them and their memories, without your heart falling out of your chest? Like the bag of Lindt white chocolate truffles I hide from myself in plain sight at the top of my pantry, how much can I scarf down before it’s too much? Just a taste, Nads, because that too much might get you.
Recently, as evidenced by running into Corinne and Nora at the airport, music triggers and sounds move. Play a song and most often I can relate it to a specific time of life. “Winning Streak” is undeniably sophomore year McDonalds runs with my boyfriend when he was still just my best friend, and “Don’t Stop the Music” is basketball drills and warmups before a Saturday morning rec league game.
Thankfully both tastes are still sweet.
I did my fifth grade Data Day project on something similar while working with actual, not metaphoric, taste. What moments could a lick of semi-melted cherry popsicle spark in our test subjects? Big questions like that. Hard and sometimes painful questions like that.
But when those moments do come rushing back - triggered by the cherry popsicle licks, lyrics, and texted check-ins that echo your too fast moments gone by - they do eventually settle. It’s then I’ve found I can make meaning beyond the initial force and Gravity (cue Sara Bareilles and Ms. Easton’s sixth grade art class) that flattened me. Those echoes that are almost as painful to relive as they are sweet to indulge in and remember.
When my old friend texted me and the tears almost swept me away, it took a few hours before that settling found me. It struck me, eventually on my drive home, that the too sweet pain came from the supreme joy (and privilege) of connecting with and witnessing the growth of humans you’ve known for nearly as long as you’ve known yourself. Followed by the sudden realization that if those humans are growing it means that you, human as well, are growing, too. And we’re here now and we’ve been here long enough to be flattened by a force so thick and deep and years old, and I’m proud of you and I’m proud of us. It’s so sweet it makes my heart hurt. It’s painful to miss things, but lovely to have lived so long and fully that there are emotional enclaves to hide and get lost in and even almost cry in your cubicle over. Life is changing and sometimes it hurts to be reminded that it’s changed but it’s still damn good, and “Like A Star” is still a fantastic song and cherry popsicles are still delicious even if it hurts to remember that they are.