Nostalgiagrief

I saw a thing (re: TikTok) recently that said nostalgia is actually grief and I cannot. stop. thinking about it. They’re right. Nostalgia is grief. It’s loss. The pang of wholesome wistfulness when I think about the purple Nickelodeon gak I threw from my bed onto the ceiling (and it stuck and left an everlasting lavender smudge). The triangular under-the-stairway half-closet in my garage where my best friend and I held Now and Then-inspired séances and RS (for "roller skate") Club meetings. Watching the “Virtual Insanity” music video on my, like, 8-inch TV/VCR combo and “Song 2” playing on my old-school red-digit alarm clock and every damn Celine Dion ballad known to man blasted from mah boombox.

All of these hyperspecific memories are etched onto my internal organs like the organic residue of some atomic sparklebomb and follow me around, dormant, wherever I go until some tiny tripwire breaks it all open again and we simply remember. And the remembering is not passive, which I think is the part I didn’t fully get before — it’s not just “aww wow the 90s,” it’s like… oh. Oof. Yeah. I lived there. That version of me lived there. And she’s gone in the way things are supposed to be gone but also not gone at all which feels like a very confusing design flaw???

It’s a memorial but one you just… accidentally walk into. On a Tuesday. While brushing your teeth or hearing three notes of a song or smelling something weirdly specific and suddenly you’re standing in a fully intact room that does not exist anymore except it does because you’re in it and also you’re not and that’s when it hits that this is maybe just what aging is — a series of these tiny, unannounced funerals for versions of yourself who had no idea they were about to become a memory. That things were dying while you were in them and didn’t know parts of you were going along with them.

And also, I don’t know. We keep going back. We hit play again. We want to feel it, even knowing what it costs, which I think means the cost is the point. Like the ache is the receipt. The proof of purchase. The only evidence we have that we were actually there, fully alive, in some lavender-smudged, boombox-blaring moment that we didn’t even realize was going to matter this much later.

So yeah. Nostalgia is grief. Which is a little controversial when you consider it’s also the thing we reach for when we want to feel something good again.

And apparently I will be revisiting my own emotional crime scenes indefinitely — not because I want to suffer, but because it’s the closest thing we have to time travel… and the only place those versions of me still exist.