we will never be those girls again.

on nostalgia, your ex-best friend, and how you can never go back (no matter how hard you try)

crayons, tv static, my mother cooking. the sound of feet on the linoleum. mildew in the grout. slippers resting on the welcome mat at my grandma’s house– her cabinets overflowing with precious-memory dolls, catholic rosaries, and beef stew. oregon pine in the summertime. plastic lei, rattling against tourist’s skinny necks. the opaque, blue scooby-doo gummy. my best friend’s golden hair, swishing through the air as strong as a horse's tail and kicking up rocks on the pathway home. i follow her like a puppy dog.

the first 18 years of my life suffer from freezer burn. although i escaped childhood with a relatively small amount of trauma, sourness still tinges the flavor of adolescence. faint shampoo smells may bring me back to school dances and whimsy, but the scent also herds a slew of fallibility– helplessness– an unshakeable anxiety. yet, despite my firm disdain of my youth, a deep longing infects me with voracity and verve.

in january, i wrote an essay called it really is that damn phone. i argued that our rapid cycle of aestheticism impacts revolutionary success. i proposed that intentional consumption and creation might serve as our solution. however, beyond vomiting my point into the ether, i fell into the same digital codependence i spent 1400 words criticizing. while i assumed i made an internal shift, my identity collapsed. i numbed with digital fluff. i stopped journaling. i ceased creating. i denied myself and, in desperation to connect to lost pieces, i dove through family archives. cataloguing my father’s old love letters, i would rather have recalled the similarities between our prose than put pen to paper.

frozen by a sense of temporal doom, my stage-4 phone addiction stems from something deeper than boredom.

i am suffering from an acute case of Nostalgia.

oh! and i caught mono… who even gets mono at the ripe age of 24?

using medical language to describe Nostalgia proves ironic (and not just because my body thinks itself to be a tween.) at a certain juncture in human history, Nostalgia actually held a medical diagnosis akin to the flu.¹ first accounts in 1688 Switzerland describe the illness as as a form of fatal homesickness, striking “young people forced from their homes”.² moving past initial impressions of the disease, medics studied Nostalgia throughout the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. afflicted soldiers often presented distress alongside dysentery and fever, becoming a “critical problem” for welfare and warfare of the 17th century.²

Svetlana Boym, cultural critic and first-gen anthropologist, emphasizes political implications of Nostalgia, noting that outbreaks of collective yearning often “follow historical revolutions”.¹ as we exist amidst a landscape on the brink of ecological, economical, and political collapse, many may relate to her assertion (i mean, just look through any millennial or gen z-er’s phone and you would find an FYP compelled under a potent strain of nostalgiacore.)³

i suppose i am “rebelling against the modern idea of time” through my Nostalgic yearning. as i revel in my old 2020 habits by playing animal crossing rather than attending to my own creative needs, i satisfy an internal and simulated paradise. i project real capitalistic worries onto a controllable utopia. i conjure an elusive, romanticized, and Nostalgic Haze that “obliterates history and turns it into private… mythology”.¹ Boym echoes that Nostalgics often “find it difficult to say what exactly they yearn for– st. elsewhere, another time, a better life”; unlike our French counterparts, many of us do not yearn for a place but an ambiguous, lost feeling.¹ this ambiguity becomes representational– exploited– through capitalistic symbols that beam in technicolor: yoplait packaging from 2009– a mcdonald's playground– the opaque, blue scooby-doo gummy.

nevertheless, Nostalgia’s antidote cannot lie in these vapid symbols. the blue scooby-doo gummy does not a childhood make.

i am entranced with that phrase: private mythology. and, i am old enough, now, to construct the walls of my pantheon– to walk through myself as a white-walled, sterile gallery. this room exists as a self-aware articulation of my history and, as i make my way down the proverbial hallway, there stands the largest statue– the cleopatra of my internal empire, mirror eyed.

i always wanted a sister, and i had one for four years; not by blood, but by a vow: the kind you make every morning with the girl who sits next to you on the bus, or through whispers at a slumber party. she and i battled for, and toward, one another. she and i saved one another from loneliness, grasping onto each other’s arm through thunder and rain. for an entire highschool term, the fabric of our relationship sewed us together in fragile, staple stitches. we forgave one another, again and again until we didn’t.

the date against her holy statue reads 2014-2018.

to recover from phone dependence, i trade one fixation for another by binging Twin Peaks with my present-day friend. every night, he and i sit side by side to indulge the phonics of Lynch’s creative dogma, making sure to never skip the intro music.

as a cultural time capsule, Twin Peaks commands itself with an air of Nostalgia. whether it be the original series’ film grain, Cooper’s coffee fixation, the soap opera acting, or those early-90’s shoulder pads, Twin Peaks pays homage to the final installment of white americana with precision and reverence. conversly, arriving at the last chapter of Laura Palmer’s story, the audience finds all visual choices removed from Lynch’s original visual style. narratives fracture into stain-glass. digital replaces film. even the actors represent a dissociation between the original series, becoming wrinkled versions of their previous portrayals (many cast members died throughout the filming, adding to this weight.) Twin Peaks unravels from Nostalgic Haze to atomic bomb, crashing and burning in it’s refusal to “[provide] a guilt-free homecoming” for it’s viewers.²

in the essay American Upanishad, Mónica Beleavan describes the loss of David Lynch as follows:

some losses are cultural watersheds, and Lynch’s death—like that of his collaborator david bowie in 2016—is exactly that: a terminus past which the future of an artform, and with it, that of a certain form of life, become irreproducible forever.⁴

indeed, some losses are cultural watersheds— their voids shaping and infiltrating reality to come. and sometimes, losses are cultural dams: spilling out and over the earth of our bodies until all previous tree, native grass, and inhabitants wipe clean– where only dreams remain— where futures must pass through a sieve of broken pillars and electrical wires. the film grain smooths out in post. the cherry pie molds. the coffee goes cold.

the orchestrator of my childhood is lost to time. a breath against glass. a memory in baroque shadow. and yet, she is still alive. in the gallery of my mind she spins on a pedestal, forever staring. no words. no laugh. just a living corpse holding a sly, knowing look against my forehead– a god in the pantheon of my private mythology– a doppelgänger of a woman in a long black dress screaming at me in reverse, her eyes glazed over.

i miss her. she will be irreproducible forever.

yet, my “st. elsewhere”– the snow globe to which i cannot return– lies not in the symbols or even in the people of my youth. it harbors itself in the simple notion of passage of time. all those afflicted with Nostalgic Disease face these same anxieties.

adult life marks itself by finality and the counterintuitive denial of this finality. we exacerbate our grief through this ignorance: the art exists– then it stops. no edits. no alterations. so too does the artist, or the friend. there are no do-overs. this is all we have. we will never be those girls again.

even more cruel, existence provides no way to avoid the shoe-drop. no matter how pristine or how delicately we move through life, yearning will always arrive on our doorsteps much too late and always at a cost. even if we fear the end from our first moment of consciousness— a lost past will not catch us until we have been away from home long enough to idealize it. the haunting will not materialize in the door frame until we develop back pain and hangovers or lose our friends to circumstance– to death.

i am in the sickness of forgetting, suspended in the slow moving of sleep. i cannot figure out if what i miss ever existed in the first place, and i refuse to construct a utopia of my past— of her and i. but, through these sparkling visions, my throat still catches a silver tear. i am caught in what Boym calls the predicament of lot’s wife, where looking back may turn me into a “pillar of salt, a pitiful monument to [my] own grief and the futility of departure”.¹

we are no longer the children we wish we could be, today– or the children we wish we could have been, then. the details escape me now. here i am, crumbling under the hot sun. my moisture fails. my freckles turn to ash in the light.

i have no suggestion for survival in this dire quest of being. i suppose my advice might be the same thing i am doing to treat my mysterious case of kissing disease: deep breaths, lots of water, and watching Twin Peaks with my dearest friend, soaking it all in for the first (and last) time.

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1. boym s. the future of nostalgia. new york: basic books; 2001.

2. o’sullivan l. the time and place of nostalgia: re-situating a french disease. journal of the history of medicine and allied sciences. 2011.

3. if you’re looking for ways to actually feel more present, i suggest reading this essay about warping your own perception of time.

4. Belevan explores Lynch’s impact on visual culture by comparing his artistic ushering to the foundations of hindu philosophy, itself. find the essay American Upanishad here. it was introduced to me by Nainoa while we watched Twin Peaks’ final season together.