Sugar Words

I catch myself ruminating at odd hours, sometimes in the middle of the day, staring at the precipitation on my plastic coffee cup, sometimes as I turn in my bed for the 10th time and watch the first sunrays plotting to enter through the blinds. 

The time of the day is of no consequence to nostalgia, as she sits there and lies about how my 18th birthday was, how wide my smile was, or when it jumbles up the facts of when my grandmom packed my school tiffin. It manipulates me into thinking about how the world really was. I still go back to the days when I walked the tree-covered path and was sipping coffee with someone by my side. Nostalgia has created memories that may never have existed; it has made me feel what I possibly never felt in the moment. You see how it’s so sly? It fills my sentences with I believe, possibly, I think, and all types of unreliability. 

But then I have no evidence either. Nostalgia is the one who is pleading in the court and the one who bangs the hammer. I am just the audience, who pretends to be entertained by its many tricks of a one-woman show. But I wonder why I have not left yet?  I like to think that I am still finding a part of me that is hidden somewhere in the folds of yesteryears, something that I think is missing in me today. But I don’t know if it is even worth missing.

Meghan Daum writes, “Younger Self will ask, ‘Okay, then what should I do?’ And of course, Older Self has no answer, because Older Self did not leave the college, did not drop the boy, did not stop pretending to have read Chaucer. And the cumulative effect of all those failures is sitting right here, administering a tongue-lashing to her younger self (which is to say herself) about actions or inactions that were never going to be anything other than what they were. And at that point the younger and older selves merge into some kind of floating blob of unfortunate yet inevitable life choices, at which point I stop the little game and nudge my mind back into real time and try to think about other things, such as what I might have for dinner that night or what might happen when I die.”

Nostalgia knows when you are the most vulnerable, so she tiptoes only when you are faced with something out of your control – like continental distance, death, heartbreak, or the becoming. It opens the doors to memories, which you believed you could control, and make a garden out of, if you want to. Yet, that’s untrue, only nostalgia has the power over your memories, so it can use it against you, make you want to chase the younger self, which is under the sunlight – a shining girl, someone who did not/could not do any wrong, whose life was a perfect dollhouse, and could move around whatever and however she wanted – but chose not to. Forever craving for what is now not yours, forever asking for the time that slipped away without notice. 

Should I call nostalgia a liar? Or do I call her a saint? If all she wants me to be is kind to my younger self. I want to believe my yesterday was a meadow filled with flowers, and nostalgia tries to convince me. I don’t want to believe that I watched the meadow burn away, and nostalgia tries to convince me. I am still standing in this Saudade meadow, with a match in one hand and water in the other.