I usually go home during university spring breaks; I’m not one for Cancún or Cabo--not when I have my island waiting for me amidst the Caribbean blue, tucked away in a languid, hazy mist of memory and childhood. Returning to one's home is always a surreal affair, and it has been my fortune to do so many times since I moved out for college. A refuge from the torments of adulthood, going back home from college is probably the closest that one can get to turning back the hands of time. This makes the experience of taking a college friend to one’s childhood hometown especially unusual-- one that’s fraught with both the vulnerability of baring one’s essential identity and the anticipation of viewing home in a renewed lens. As my friend and I sat under the cold blue lights of the airport gate waiting for our group number to be called, I felt an overwhelming awareness that this trip would be different.
We were lazing out on one of my favourite beaches on a striking noon, sweat gathering around the nape of our necks and swimsuits digging into our skin."So, what tea was spilled on this beach over the years?” my friend asked casually. She was met with an unsatisfactory sputter as my brain struggled to reflect on the implications of a seemingly innocuous question. Indeed, how many of my spiels of teenage angst, wonder and romanticization had been swept from shore to ocean? How many conversations with friends and revelatory secrets had the sea borne witness to over the years? Innumerable childhood memories had been buried into the heart of this island, sedimented by the pressures of time. Throughout the trip I couldn’t help but unearth these ghosts of my past lives in the guise of recounting childhood adventures to my friend. “For memories’ sake”. The reminiscing to resurrection pipeline, if you will.
Unsurprisingly, these apparitions were insistent on following me, and I was unable to fully immerse myself in the present. As my friend and I floated through the clear waters of the Public Beach, I saw them there, thirteen years old and splayed out on the white sand, doubled over in laughter. As we sunbathed on our sea-soaked beach towels by the Cove, they were there again, omnipresent, sixteen and spontaneously jumping off the jagged iron-shore, hand in hand with my childhood friend.
We leave pieces of ourselves everywhere we go. As it turns out, I had left more splinters of my past selves around this little island than I previously thought, and they had grown into massive spectres fed on a diet of nostalgia and memory. I found them haunting the solitary streets of my adolescence, the air-conditioned grocery store aisles, the gas station, the curling mangroves by my friend's old house they no longer live in. I found them in the four pm traffic and the stench of the accumulated seaweed on the drive to town. They seemed to be everywhere.
Whenever we leave home, we leave it in a stagnation which ferments these spectres in a brew of memory that strengthens upon our return. As far as I was concerned, the passage of time did not exist in my hometown-- my nostalgia was protecting these ghosts of my past selves from drowning in the waves of time, lest their disappearance awaken me into the grit of reality (one that I have admittedly, been increasingly avoiding).
Showing my college friend around--someone who did not witness my formative years on this island-- meant that the familiar and the changed became harder to distinguish; timelines rapidly blurred. The collision of a marker of my present life with the island of my past created a catastrophic mass extinction event that killed those spectres of memory for good. The illusion of sameness was irrevocably shattered.
The waves of time had won; upon tearing the veil of memory, the spectres were finally put to rest in the crevices of the past. Strangely, I found myself missing them throughout the trip. I missed the warmth of recognisance they had provided, for now I was a tourist in my own home, and the island had become a stranger. I fumbled with the indicator at multiple roundabouts that grew bigger when I was gone, gawked at new resorts that didn’t exist during my time, and stared at old buildings that were almost unrecognisable in their new glossy paints. The island had forged ahead without me and I yearned for familiarity in the absence of those ghosts; I searched desperately for a sign of recognition that, despite the rising tides of change, the island would still hold a place for me.
I wish I could say I was reassured, but we were only on the island for a week. Carrying my suitcase up the plane ramp, I recalled how ten years ago the airport was once a quaint brown triangular building with a viewing area for folks to watch the plane land on the tarmac that faced the sea. I stared at its current form, a clinical white structure with frosted windows. There was an irreparable sense of loss lingering in the balmy air-- how much change was yet to come? How much more would I miss as I carried my life forward?
By the time I re-entered my college apartment, I had reached a state of acceptance; this feeling of loss was just a prerequisite to the inevitable passage of time. On revisiting some photos from the break, I was drawn to a snapshot of the morning sun at the beach. It reminded me of a sunrise I had chased the summer before college--different beach, same island. Same fondness at the way the sunlight scattered through the waving casuarina trees. Same swelling of the heart at the sight of an endless horizon, even three years later. Same love for an island that may no longer love me back.
I think of the Portuguese word ‘saudade’: a particular mix of melancholy, longing and loss with no direct equivalent in English. The spectres had written a parting note before they left me to reconcile with the vastness of the present: change may be inevitable but the feelings will always remain the same. As more of my childhood friends graduate college and less of us come home during summers, without a doubt things will be different from here. I’m glad I broke out of my nostalgic trance; nothing is ever in stasis-- the world operates in a dynamism of the present and things are always in perpetual motion. Yet, the presence of love still remains in the absence of the familiar. The island may have moved on without me, but the joy it granted me and the emotions that I hold for it will always carry in my heart, even as the waves of time wash me to distant shores.
