Living in Nostalgia
written by Elena Chen
Reflecting is one of my favorite things to do. It’s one of the things I’ve become most habituated to doing. Are those one and the same? Maybe that’s why I love vlogs so much, the voyeurism allows for stolen glances of nostalgia. Like this vlog about Paris, reminded me of our old neighborhood, right next to Jardin du Luxembourg and this other one that conjured up all sorts of emotions around Los Angeles and moving for the first time to university in the UK.
On the metro two days ago, my partner grew reminiscent of California and we spoke about moving back. This is a moment I have lived and relived so many times before, hypothetically revisiting life in the cities and homes I have now left behind. But is it possible to leave them behind? The longing that seems to tether parts of me to these places that I didn’t always even enjoy being in when I was there. This retrospective beautifying, a rose-colored remembrance that has remained as an automatic rendering that I feel overcome by. I don’t think I actually enjoy feeling nostalgia this often.
credit: Elena Chen, Los Angeles circa 2016
Pining for smells and sounds that I know can at best bring me back to a time that is no longer. Seeking to replicate the tastes of dishes and syllables that form new souvenirs based on etched outlines of existing ones. Distant yet profoundly internal, the intimate and solitary experience of being neither here nor there is tasked to the carrier safeguarding the unique past preserved in her memory. A hundred breakups with parks, restaurants, pubs, museums, roads, streets, accents, customs, habits, fashions, people, friends and the versions of me that saw and felt the things I did when I did. I take none of it back and I would do it all over again in a heartbeat. But what do I do with the me now, who has to live with all that has come and gone?
What does it mean to be a person where I could be from anywhere and nowhere at the same time?
