new years eve, 2022

Nostalgia is a one-way street. There are infinite permutations of past selves to empty and wear, like a dress up of memory.

What is the utility of looking towards the past? It is not equal in value to looking towards the future. But both the past and the future are forever different from the present.

Why do I love to see myself in the past? Is it because I can have enough distance, like an observer in the room? I can finally see the substance of my offering, or at least imagine it. I become the audience member that I was seeking, observing with perfect understanding and rationality, like a god.
~

I feel like a molder, stretching a taffy-like substance, thinking maybe I’ll finally get the hang of the past/present/future. I’m thinking about it because it’s new years eve. Because I saw an old video.

Nostalgia isn’t fun to feel, but it’s hard to imagine fondness without it. It’s some third, in between thing.
~

I’ve been grieving everything recently, even parts of myself I still have. There’s a deafening loneliness in the air. Do you feel it too? It silences me. It sits on my chest.

I embody this liminal space, not quite alive, not quite dead. Where it hurts to see my own aliveness in my memories. Because the shock of all I’ve grieved in so little time makes me unsure of the certainty of any movement. It’s like the bomb has gone off, but there’s still radiation to monitor, to see what imprint it will make on my body. Like radiation, the half life of all of our loss outlives our bodies.
~

It’s taken me lots of time to sink into this body, this body that may never again know young, healthy, clear cut comfort. But it will always from now on have the stubborn wisdom of all that suspends this body in its physical and political spaces.

Grief might be mostly about learning it’s not a choice—to accept the wisdom path of radioactive decay or revert to the comfort of the past. Nostalgia likes to tell you that you still have a choice. But it’s a back and forth rocking. It will never let you be still.
~

Someone’s already started digging the grave, and you want to call off the funeral because you found something still alive in your memories?
~

Maybe everything that happens in a lifetime is really just one big point, stretched out over time so that it can be remembered.

Each being, with its different speed. A hummingbird, experiencing time in such dilation. An ant. A turtle. Different registers of speed-feeling.

I am here to feel each peak and valley. So that when it all converges together into a single point, I carry that memory with me, separated enough so that I can recall the sequences of the rehearsed dance.
~

I don’t know if I should project so much emotion onto memories, even if they are happy. I don’t think a memory’s arms are strong enough to lift such a saturated gaze.

In that moment, I was just as cranky, just as rushed, just as out of my body as ever. I wonder if the moments where I felt most opened to the present, most in my body, are actually the ones that escape my memory. Maybe we recall memories to complete them, to fill in the gaps of attention that we did not have at the time. To iron over the bad mood that should have been more grateful. Maybe this is why we recall our traumas thousands of times, to slowly make them whole.
~

So what good does it do to pin a moment down and say “no, that was IT.” Maybe the it-ness is just what I want for the present, more easily objectified onto a pinned down subject. It’s easier to make wholeness out of an already partially filled memory vessel than to fully create it in real time.

The arch of yearning to project wholeness onto a past memory is best redirected towards enfleshing the present. We’re not meant to love objects, we’re meant to occupy unfathomable timelessness.
~

Look in the mirror. It’s the same you that haunts your memories. Everything is now.

Nostalgia, well intentioned as it is, can make what was, in its context, a relief to let go, into something I now cling onto, forgetting why it had to leave. It’s a sleepwalking gravedigger, recklessly reaching for a shovel to dig up the deceased.