On nostalgia, memories, and saying goodbye
One of my all-time favorite movie scenes, near the end of About Time, has repeatedly made me sit in silence during the credits. Tim, the protagonist who has spent the whole film traveling back through his own past, arrives at a conclusion that seems fairly simple, but is much more difficult than I expected.
"I just try to live every day as if I've deliberately come back to this one day, to enjoy it, as if it was the full final day of my extraordinary, ordinary life."
Watch it once and you might mistake it for standard-issue carpe diem advice. Watch it again and really listen, and you catch what makes it so utterly gut wrenching. Tim is telling us to choose the ordinary, reaching back through every day you have ever lived and point at this one — this Tuesday, this commute, this unremarkable, routine hug or kiss and say: that one. I want that one. But why?
Our generation has made an art form out of waiting. We wait for weekends, for summer, for the job offer, the love of your life, the moment everything finally clicks. I have found this habit of waiting to be so automatic that the days in between blur into one massive Phineas and Ferb summer-esq lifetime.
And yet, we are almost clinically nostalgic. Nostalgia has actually shifted from the longing of something gone in a harmless way, to the longing of some imagined perfectperiod in our past. We long to return home to somewhere that does not exist, leading to the rejection or hatred of the world. While even Plutarch was nostalgic for the lost golden age of the Greeks, we romanticize entire decades we never lived through. We cry over Snapchat memories from three years ago as though they are dispatches from a lost civilization. Childhood movies get rewatched as if the right film might excavate the person we used to be. I cannot tell you how many times I have rewatched Mama Mia this week alone. We have immediate, dangerous access to entire corners of the internet that exist solely to aestheticize simpler times. We sleepwalk through the present while curating an archive of it, only to grieve the archive later. It's almost as if we are homesick for a home we are currently standing in, terrified of being alone. Humans crave connection so deeply that it is sown into our psychology. No matter how independent a person may seem, everyone wants to start a life of their own, gets homesick, and then yearns to share what they’ve built.
A towel fort built poolside with a younger sibling, tropical popsicles that stain your teeth. Cliff jumping and the fullness of all-you-can-eat sushi after. The cinnamon sugar taste of Christmas 2009 and the smell of Thanksgiving assembling itself in a grandparent's kitchen. The electric certainty of a first love, the absolute conviction that nothing would ever matter more, which is hilarious in retrospect. A first night in a new dorm, dinner on the Columbia lawns, rooftop tanning between finals, looking at turtles in Central Park, bonfires, wine with the people who have known you longest. Making cancelled flights into the best days ever, cafés discovered on foot, running to the beach on the last day of school, post-practice breakfasts that tasted better than anything ever should, and finding the perfect song that gives you butterflies even while waiting for the L train after work. Dancing in the kitchen to Abba with my roommates, post-going out debriefs, reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time, and daily Westside coffee.
None of these were headline moments at the time, but they were the days in which my five senses were stimulated most memorably by the little things. Now, they are the days that I return to again and again.
That is the cruelest and most beautiful part of the whole arrangement is that you may not know which days those are while you are in them. What really has made me think is the fact that Tim could go back. He had the literal ability to return to any day he had ever lived and stand inside it again, feel the temperature of it, hear the specific voices, kiss his wife, and hug his father. What broke me is that even with that power, even with unlimited access to every moment he had ever lived, he still had to learn to be present. However, he chose it every single day.
You and I don't get to time travel (yet). The days come and they go and they become memories and the memories eventually become feelings and the feelings eventually become something you can't even name anymore. I have covered this in one of my previous posts, but this all changed for me after my gap year. I began starting my days by telling myself this would be the “best day ever.” For me, this was not necessarily a claim that it would be the most extraordinary day, every day. What I gained was the decision to meet it as if it already is, and I swear there is so much power in these three words. So much so that if you were to wake up next to me, you would hear me literally say them out loud. All these moments I listed above were special because I was there fully, not just waiting and waiting for what came next.
Some of the best days of your life have already happened. Even better, some of the best days of your life are also coming, and likely nothing will look different about them from the outside. They will show up disguised as a car ride where the right song comes on and everyone in the car already knows the words, or a phone call that becomes the last phone call. I have felt this ache for a Tuesday in summer 2019 that meant nothing when it was happening. I have felt it for a version of myself that was bored and hangry and completely unaware that I was standing in the middle of something I would spend years trying to get back to.
And if you know me, you know that I am HORRIBLE at saying goodbye, but I am starting to think that is not a flaw. I believe that if you are bad at goodbyes, it means you were actually there, and that the thing mattered enough to leave a very precious but painful mark on the way out.
Tim could go back to these days, and even he eventually stopped going, because he realized going back was a way of not being here. The secret formula to the best day ever, is that you have to be so awake that when the ordinary day comes, you can remember every part of it. Someday, you will want it back so badly it will feel like grief, and the only difference between that grief being bearable or not is whether you were actually there the first time.
Xoxo,
Annie
