There are approximately 6 (six) months until the dreaded twenties make its unwelcome introduction into my life, and I cannot even begin to describe the endless emotions that swarm my brain when I give the concept a second thought. Perhaps the word that encapsulates the tumult would be yearning. But for what? I’m not exactly sure, but this longing has plagued my mind ever since I was fifteen, and I haven’t been able to let it go since.
It seems that obsessive nostalgia has become innate to my personhood. As I write this, I fondly recollect a conversation with my friends a few weeks ago as we cast our minds back to our high school selves. As we talked about the fragile beauty of being sixteen, teetering on the cusp of adulthood, I began to realize the intense distorting power that our rose-tinted glasses held. Why did we as college students, despite being separated by five thousand miles of ocean, despite being on diverging paths of life, feel the need to revisit those bygone days of teenagedom? I mean, the reality of adolescence was clearly duller than the dreamy snapshots of the past we had revisioned in our minds. Our brains seemed to conveniently forget the growing pains of identity crises, IGCSE exams, and unrequited love. I will say in retrospect though, it is rather amusing to remember how small we were, yet how big we felt. We subscribed to a social geocentrism; we teenagers were the centre of the solar system that is humanity. Perhaps now more than ever we desperately chase that feeling. As life constantly reminds us of our insignificance, we yearn for the days when we could hold the entire world in the palm of our hands.
Yet, there is far more to it than just mindless reminiscence. For me, those feelings are almost painful. The bittersweet friendships I treasured and lost all come back to me, as do the loved ones I’ve left behind in my selfish pursuit of (what exactly?) These pangs of nostalgia often shock me back into my corporeal existence, forcing me to ground myself in the grayscale reality of college, deadlines, and adulthood, lest I continue reliving my past as if it were the present.
There are times when I doubt whether I pine for real moments of my life, or an alternate reality, one of the thousand lifetimes I never got to live. What is even stranger is that I rarely return to life milestones during my frequent trips down memory lane; it’s almost never high school graduation, prom, or birthdays. It is somehow, invariably, the mundane. It’s walking past the campus coffee carts and smelling roasting coffee that reminds you of the iced latte at the coffeehouse by the tutoring centre you walked to every other evening in year eleven. It’s enjoying a particularly pink Californian sunset and wishing, more than anything, that you were watching the sun make its way down the rolling hills of Wales, casting a gentle golden light on your friends. It’s picking your brother up from his high school (it was your high school first). “Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”.
Unsurprisingly, nostalgia has crawled its way into my present, too. Countless times my roommates and I will sit and talk for hours on the plain living room carpet until midnight and I’ll look at the way the thirty-dollar IKEA lamp light bleeds shadows onto our blue couch and I’ll think to myself “I am yearning for this moment” as I live in it. I think to myself wistfully, “This moment will mould me into the person I will be 5 years from now”. The second the thought escapes my head it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, I suppose.
But I digress.
I recently talked to a dear friend about loving and valuing the quotidian, but it appears that my intentions are assumably not as pure as hers. It seems like I’ve made the entire purpose of my existence to be deemed worthy enough of being material for future nostalgias (it’s undoubtedly working). And while I continue to grapple with finding meaning within the larger scheme of things, for now, I am positively content with assembling a life for myself that I consider deserving of recollection. As I would think of it, it is a privilege to be able to reflect on certain moments in your life because it means that it was monumental enough to shape you into who you are today.
So maybe I will remain steeped in this nostalgia after all.