New Nostalgia.
It's quite funny how these past 4 months, I took on a personal project to explore the topic of change and its effect on my everyday life. Little did I think that my biggest personal change would occur over the holidays in my hometown.
This change was the discovery of my new form of nostalgia. No longer did I experience nostalgia from my surrounding environment. There was an unexpected numbness to everything around me. I learned that my new nostalgia lives in people, not places. Mom, Dad, friends I’ve known since I was 9, cousins, best friends, middle school crushes. It was the people in front of me who created that sense of comfort. My new form of nostalgia revealed itself after a night spent with a best friend. Here’s what I wrote that night about the topic– why I refer to myself in the 3rd person in this writing– no clue. But, here’s how I made sense of the moment.
“She stands in her kitchen of the house she grew up in eating one bowl of cereal and then another. Her parents are sound asleep at their usual bedtime of 10pm. The two sources of light come from the streetlamp light shining through the window and the overhead kitchen stovetop bulb. The type of lighting that creates an eerie silhouette as she leans against the kitchen countertop. She looks down and it hits her- “When was the last time I had cereal?” “How old was I?” Cereal is something she never eats anymore. Which then leads her to wonder if she ever thought she’d end up here. How she doesn’t feel nostalgic about home, unlike before. Which makes her weep; because she no longer has the delicate protection of nostalgia. Nostalgia has the power to filter your sorrows and hardships of real adulthood. And that comfort she had loved so much no longer coddled her. Unknowingly, one day, that warm nostalgia had cleared away; which is okay.
She, in that moment, no longer felt the shifting winds of change in her life. For the first time, she found full pleasure in her presence. Thankful for her past, but no longer fantasizing about it.”
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I like to believe that that night in my kitchen was my coming of age moment. The moment when you start to yearn more for the future, no longer the past.