Emaan Irfan Week 16: Nostalgia is a dull knife (If I Can’t Have It, It Should Haunt Me, At Least)
The pavement is scorching. I step out of my mom’s beat-up Honda, the one we spent all spring repairing.
I look around the dystopian nightmare of a gas station we’ve just stopped at.
As one does on these road trip stops, I start analyzing my surroundings. I wander across bathroom graffiti.
I wonder, "Why did someone click off a Sharpie cap just to write, '*Insert name* wuz here'? At least be creative!"
It’s the same reason why I collected bottle caps, and why I kept clothes I’ve outgrown.
I think part of that was because I moved around a lot. Sometimes we cling to a semblance of something to feel like it is still there. I suppose that’s why we write stories as well.
I mean, isn't all of art a reason to say, to prove, “I was here.”
As we near the end of this school year, I realized it’s not a bad thing to be sentimental. Looking at everyone’s collages, I see pieces of lives lining Mrs. Smith’s classroom like books lining a shelf—stories in guitar picks, gum wrappers, Polaroids, and old notebooks. Stories that say over and over, “I was here.”
But we must not live in the past. Last year I packed parts of my life away in cardboard boxes, or as a sane person would phrase it, I donated my old clothes. I realized I’d been hoarding so much junk just to live in another reality. I’ll keep my yearbooks and pictures of my journalism class taped on my walls, but sometimes a bottle cap is just a bottle cap, and a number is just a number.
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| One of the photo walls in my room |
Now, I won’t go all Aamir Khan on you and act as if I know how everyone should live, this is just my experience. We don’t have to tuck pebbles from some beach into our pockets to remember why we love our friends. Call them. Tell them. Reliving memories can be healthy, but we must remember what makes us love the “good old days” so much, it’s what we learn from them, and it is the people we spend them with. In the words of Nanki Kaur’s infinite sagacity, “romanticize your present.”
So, awkwardly linger on the front porch, stay for a cup more, and forget your coat, again, and again, and again.
Emaan, I totally agree about living in the present. But at the same time, keeping little mementos of the past is important to me as it serves as a reminder of where I came from. We can live in the present without forgetting the past. Just like in English, we have to remember the alphabet to write our intricate analysis essays. These memories are building blocks for us. We cannot let go of the past to simply live in the present. I think we have to balance it. We can't let the past overwhelm us and take over our present, but this does not mean we completely let go of it. I do agree that some parts of the past need to be let go. For example, hoarders who somehow find everything to have significance when they are simply just worthless objects. Not everything has significance to our past, but we should not let go of the things that do. Overall, your blog was insightful and got my brain thinking.
ReplyDeleteHi Phyo! Yes, that was what I was trying to illustrate. I'm afraid it might've come off a little more black and white than I intended.
DeleteHi Emaan! As always, your writing style never fails to impress me. Similar to you, I often found myself holding on to pieces of my past. However, over the last year, I have learned a lot about who I am and what really matters to me. This has forced me to avoid thinking of the "what if I need this one day" and to start thinking about making space for new things. This is both literal and metaphorical as I have started to take steps to clear my mind of past memories which make me unhappy and hurt me. As you put it, I think this tendency is rooted to moving around often as I moved around a lot when I was a kid. Your blog made me realize that we cannot live in the present as Nanki says when we are weighed down by the past. Also, I like how you mentioned the purpose of art, I mean the purpose of anything in life is to make a mark, to prove that in fact, you were there. I absolutely adored reading your blogs throughout the year, thank you so much for sharing!
ReplyDeleteHello Emaan, my lovely girl. You continue to amaze me and set my mind and soul ablaze with the way that you capture the essence of youth and girlhood and time within your writing. I used to think about that all the time (and still do). The *Insert name* was here. We're all just so desperate to make our mark somewhere in this world and prove that we were worth something and that we were valuable and here and present and loud and that we just existed. I hope you know that your blogs have written an "Emaan waz here" all over my mind and heart with the realizations that you have exposed me to. I understand the feeling of wanting and feeling the need to keep everything, so afraid to let go of the past. I think I'm honestly feeling some of that right now. In a way, I take all the photos and polaroids and videos because I'm afraid that if I do not capture every minute and the "feeling in it" it will fade away just as every other memory does. Blurry. Half pieced together. It's a scary feeling, change. I'm terrified of it. And while I'm running out of time to drone on and on about how much I admire you, I am honored to have been a part of your last blog. Thank you for this ride and this you for the journey and thank you for the writing and the inspiration and the friendship. Grateful, grateful, grateful.
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