Nostalgia, Not.

TW: PHYSICAL AND SEXUAL VIOLENCE, PTSD

You can’t feel nostalgia anymore. You’re not sure if you ever could - can a child be nostalgic? You had difficulty understanding emotions as a child, especially ones involving other people, like embarrassment. Nostalgia doesn’t fall into that category, but it is an emotion that’s easier to feel when there’s someone to share it with, someone who was there at the time. The feelings your parents feel when reminiscing about your childhood just don’t exist in you. Maybe because you’re not that kid anymore. Maybe you’re not a child anymore.

Maybe you don’t feel what they do because they didn’t get to see the underbelly of that childhood, the weaknesses the other children could see so easily, the ones that left you torn open, broken ribs from a bat being brought down onto an eleven year old in the summer sun. Nostalgia is an emotion most often associated with summers, and you spent so many struggling to breathe even after the one when you were eleven - the summer between elementary and middle school, the summer your so-called best friend attempted to murder you twice, but you were the one asked to leave summer camp, deemed a threat.

Nobody ever teaches children that other children can be abusive because childhood is innocence, isn’t it? Children are innocent, that’s why “it doesn’t matter who started it.” You tried so hard to stop fighting back, but the summer you stopped, she tried to drown you and beat you.

You were left with broken ribs and enough anger that you made empty threats about wanting to kill her. And you were sent home. The same home you currently haunt, far from summers and childish threats. Your parents told you you were being overdramatic back then. You never bring it up now, not wanting to be overdramatic about problems that are gone. 

You’re writing in second person because you want to do what the prompt insists - show the reader why. But certain aspects can’t be universalized, so you are the author. Pretend, even if you’re not. Try to imagine:

You were a girl back then, and you’re a man now. The metamorphosis was hurtful because middle school children were violent. The inability to use the bathroom resulted in a kidney stone when you were fourteen, which truly is/was the worst form of physical pain you had experienced thus far in your life. Being a complicated timeline, you morphed from girl to boy to man. If you can even call yourself a man now. You probably can, five years out from the threshold of legal adult age.

 Plus being transgender is inherently political now, whereas back then it was just… we had Glee’s last season, that was it for representation. And some young adult novels. And memoirs. Okay, arguably, there’s a lot of transgender history one could be nostalgic for from the 2010’s, and you participate in that by writing Glee fanfiction. But it’s not really nostalgia because you didn’t become invested in Glee until long after it aired. 

You’re what the internet would call - does call - a fake fan. You take some pride in that, like how when you were a child forced into competitions in Physical Education you would take pride in being a loser because if winning was impossible, why not want to lose in the first place? You tricked yourself into happiness that way, like how now you enter fandoms long dead, poke at their corpses with your creations, hoping its bones might be unburied a decade in the future the way you unburied Glee Angst Meme prompts from 2011. Now, in a world of remakes and reboots, sequels and prequels, fandoms rarely truly die - the lightning of a revival is always a possibility. You never really cared for being popular, but part of you hopes nostalgia will bring readers to your creations anyway.

See, if this was fiction, there’d be a flashback at some point showing why you’re like this, and it would probably be here. At the mention of overdramatic, the words would go italic like the way the mind goes fuzzy, blurred, dissociation, that’s the technical word for what happens because this isn’t real - you don’t let the memories belong to you.

You treat the memories like someone else’s past, Blaine Anderson or Cat Valentine, some fictional character with a fake smile and an older brother they only talk about in stories meant to remind the audience of how weird and quirky this character is.

Memories of fingers and eyes staring holes through that body you refuse to acknowledge, you weren’t just a child being told “you know better and he doesn’t.” The implication being those fingers being underneath underwear wasn’t the fault of the person who put them there… but your fault. Your fault for violently trying to fight to remove them, for believing this was wrong, for not accepting that this was love…

You shake your head like an Etch-A-Sketch - you’ve used that phrasing before in your writing, in your depictions of fictional characters fighting off the past you provide them. Just thinking about nostalgia for too long always brings you back to why you’re not. You can’t be. 

You can’t change the direction of time, like a previous week’s prompt suggested, and the ideas associated with childhood were mainly that of powerlessness, not freedom. Not innocence, which never existed due to your body being a battle against death from day one, only that war will never fully be won. Maybe nostalgia is how normal people cope with the fear of death: children didn’t understand their own mortality, being closer to the beginning of life than its end. 

You’re still closer to the beginning of life than its end. Maybe someday you’ll be nostalgic for this time, the unemployed early twenties, hours spent writing fanfiction and cover letters, applying to job after job. You can’t be sure you’ll even remember it, though - the COVID-19 years blurred together, leaving you with limited knowledge about when anything happened in university. You keep a journal in case you’ll want to look back with dates. In case anything happens that you might look back on fondly, you’ll want a record. Your memories are untrustworthy when it comes to holding onto happiness.