nostalgic for something
the farce of adulthood
A friend of mine had an interesting thought, that propelled affirmative nods and stayed in my mind for many days:
Is adulthood just rediscovered nostalgia?
Are we all searching for the little children we once were? So excited to grow up but now all grown up with nowhere to go. Or is it the mundanity of this life where on the ride back home, the home that is still shared with our parents, we wonder, ‘is this it?’ Perhaps it is the feeling of moving back home from university that can unleash this. 4 years away, 4 years of independence, of freedom, only to come back to the inverse. To be happy for the comfort, but resent the familiarity.
Where do we go from here?
To greater lives, or bigger escapes? Maybe moments where adulthood may feel like childhood again. Where sitting on a bed with 3 reconnected friends feels like that one night 3 years ago, reliving the pain and feeling the peace all over again. Revising history, and recreating it. Sitting in front of a friend you used to see almost every day, either from your kitchen window or downstairs in her pajamas for a smoke break, now sitting in front of you maybe every 6 months.
If the past is a museum then I’m an archeologist. Obsessed with digging up relics, dusting them off, and holding onto them for dear life. A body in the present but a mind in what once was and what could’ve been.
“Many years have passed since that night. The wall of the staircase up which I had watched the light of his candle gradually climb was long ago demolished. And in myself, too, many things have perished which I imagined would last for ever, and new ones have arisen, giving birth to new sorrows and new joys which in those days I could not have foreseen, just as now the old are hard to understand.”1
Is childhood lost once you see the change in your grandfather’s gait? Or the loss of memories in your grandmother? Maybe when the cracks in your old home don’t tell your story anymore? The cutlery loses its sheen and the mats stained and battered have been thrown away. Disposal and renovation, erasure and removal. If the ghost of you still runs through the corridor of your old school, are you there? The music that once played to wake you up, the dreamlike movement of a sports day march past, the safety of knowing everything’s handled and taken care of. Maybe early adulthood is the reinvention of late childhood-yearning to be small and taken care of once again, and seeing yourself as the large parent looming over a little body. You are the guardian and you are the baby.
Homesickness for a different time, a younger body, a more organised mind and an angsty heart. To see friends you don’t anymore, to speak to the spirit of them, thanking them for the people they unknowingly brought into your life. Missing, wanting, perishing; all in five seconds. Bonding over a shared love of the same pretentious movies when you’re sixteen, watching the films now wondering what you were thinking back then. When a message gets missed, hoping for that time to come back somehow, rushed hands and heavy breathing run towards the phone. A two hour long conversation between two different cities brings it all back, a rainbow trip in front of your face, remembrance all over that night.
Perhaps it is 5 years later when you are nostalgic for a white shirt that always felt one size too small, and a wonky wooden table where your legs would never fit. Annoyedly shaving your legs reminds you of the time you begged for permission to get waxed, impulsive decisions remind the child that the things she once wanted can come true. Remembering the monologue from Merchant of Venice, being transported back to a hot classroom, everybody in the same race against time, fingers cramping, pens running out of ink, asking for one supplement after another. Turning around after the paper’s done, signifying I’m free. Was it really freedom after all?
When the bedsheets don’t display the same dreams you once had, now they reflect reality, is that when you’ve grown up? Wanting to go back to a life you always wanted to escape, the paradox is laughable. In the clouds of ultra youth filled with the misery of imperceptible annoyances, it was all about being on your own one day. Now that you are, how does it feel? Does the nostalgia of being tucked into bed and kissed on the head come looming like a dark cloud on a hot day? The surety of knowing that there are two figures always right outside your locked room, waiting to save you, does that feeling last when you’re 5 hours behind, waiting for them to call?
Nostalgia and I exist in a state of limerence. I pull away but at nights I’m pushed back in, no choice in the matter. Trying to stay away, but the attraction is fierce. Yearning for one more day of unbridled joy and holding hands because you have to, not because you want to. To sparkle before the fatigue begins. For an easier life, for a simpler time.
Playing in the sun, getting darker as the minutes go by. Salty sweat and tired limbs, but the kind of lethargy that would like to be stretched. Just 5 minutes, then it’s time for dinner.
5 more minutes, and it’s time to go back to real life.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time I, (London: Vintage Classics, 2005), p.43