And if I am so nostalgic at this age, what will i do at 60?
In my opinion, nostalgia is just another word for homesickness, except nobody can tell you where home is anymore.
It’s strange what survives.
I don’t remember what I learnt in school in the previous years.
I remember praying for rain because rain meant there was a chance school would be cancelled. Not because I hated school. I loved school. But a rainy day belonged to no one. It escaped the timetable. The whole world felt unofficial. Even the adults became softer. We’d spend the afternoon wrapped in blankets, and I genuinely believed life would always have days that forgot to happen properly.
Maybe that’s what childhood was.
Days that forgot to happen properly.
Nothing was productive.
Nothing was documented.
It simply existed.
Nobody was trying to preserve anything.
We didn’t interrupt afternoons to take pictures because it never occurred to us that afternoons could end forever.
The first time I woke up at four in the morning to go cycling with my friends, it didn’t occur to me that one day I’d remember that morning more vividly than my own birthdays. We weren’t trying to make memories. We were trying to beat the sunrise. There’s such an enormous difference.
I think that’s what hurts.
I don’t miss birthdays nearly as much as I miss the afternoon I spent making mud cakes and genuinely believing they looked edible. I miss falling over, skinning my knee and proudly showing my friends the wound as though I’d returned from war.
Back then, everything was platonic. Gossip was harmless. If two people in the friend group liked each other, we’d marry them off during recess and then immediately forget about it because someone had brought Beyblades to school. Nobody knew what dating was. Nobody knew what “weird” was either. We wore whatever made us feel like the main character that morning. We sang terribly. We danced worse. We were cringe before cringe became something to be ashamed of. We were ridiculous, but we were free. Maybe those two words have always meant the same thing.
Unfortunately, life doesn’t let you revisit old versions of yourself. It only lets you remember them with excruciating accuracy.
I would give absolutely anything to be seven again. Not because seven was extraordinary, but because it wasn’t. I want to be excited about using a brand-new pen for the first time again. I want to believe a bad haircut is the worst thing that could ever happen to me. I want to re-read Diary of a Wimpy Kid for the first time and think Greg Heffley is the funniest person to have ever existed (I had a huge crush on Rodrick btw ;D).
I want wired earphones tangled at the bottom of my bag, an iPod with a playlist that made absolutely no sense, Pitbull followed by Kesha, followed by Maroon 5, followed by Britney Spears, followed by Hannah Montana (I still have a picture of her on my wallet).
I want the EOS lip balms everyone swore were magical. I want the phase where every girl wanted streaks of blue or pink in her hair because we thought looking like a MyScene doll was the pinnacle of human achievement. Oh yeah and being a “Cool Kid” because I had read the Percy Jackson series.
And God, the slime.
I don’t think my family ever recovered financially from the amount of body wash I quietly sacrificed in the name of scientific research. Every failed batch somehow made me believe the next one would finally work. That’s childhood, isn’t it? A complete inability to be embarrassed by hope.
I had the best childhood I could’ve possibly asked for.
People always say that sentence with gratitude.
I say it with grief.
Because that’s exactly what hurts.
Nothing has ever matched it since then.
Two summers from now, I know I’ll miss this one too. I know I’ll ache for the version of myself who’s worrying about the future instead of living inside it. But knowing that doesn’t seem to help. It only adds another layer to the homesickness.
I still think about those people.
More often than they’d probably guess.
I hope life has been gentle with them.
I hope somebody still laughs exactly the same way.
I hope one of them still believes being weird is cool.
Because it is.
It always was.
Children never know they’re inside the good old days because children don’t have good old days.
They only have today.
I don’t know when that changed.
I can’t pinpoint the exact afternoon my life split itself into living and remembering.
Maybe it happened the first time I thought, I should take a picture of this.
Maybe it happened when my friends stopped showing up at my house unannounced and started asking three business days in advance if I was free.
Maybe it happened the day I realised that every person I loved was slowly becoming a different person somewhere else.
Everybody says, “People grow apart,” as if it’s some dramatic event.
It isn’t.
It’s microscopic.
One friend moves cities.
Someone else starts sleeping earlier.
Somebody gets busier.
One conversation becomes two weeks.
Two weeks become six months.
And then one day your entire childhood only exists because four people accidentally remember different parts of it.
I’m seventeen.
That’s the part that feels unfair.
People speak about nostalgia as though it’s a privilege reserved for old people.
But I already feel haunted.
Sometimes I think my life has happened too quickly for my soul to keep up with it.
I still haven’t emotionally left those memories.
Or that rainy afternoon.
Or that road where we cycled before the rest of the city woke up.
My body is here.
Something else is still arriving.
And then I have the most ridiculous thought.
If seventeen already feels like this, what happens at sixty?
Do old people spend entire afternoons recovering from the smell of wet soil?
Does a particular quality of sunlight ruin their whole Tuesday?
Do they hear a pressure cooker whistle from another apartment and suddenly have to sit down because for one impossible second they’re eight years old again?
Nobody prepares you for the possibility that the real ghosts are not people.
They’re versions of yourself that still believe everyone they love will be there tomorrow.
I think about her all the time.
I still wonder where that girl thinks I am.
Maybe she assumes I became exactly who she imagined.
I don’t have the heart to tell her otherwise.
And if you’ve made it this far, then congrats here is a playlist of the immaculate music taste i had when my age was still in single digits ;)
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