Poison

“He talked about the ocean between people. And how the whole point of everything is to find a shore worth swimming to.”
― Becky Albertalli, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

Nostalgia is a special kind of poison. Like alcohol, at first it tastes sweet and begins to make you feel warm inside and then eventually after you’ve indulged too much it can make you sick. It builds up from the pit of your stomach until it completely ruins you. Then the cycle continues. You make the same promise that you’ll never visit that place again, you’ll never drink again but deep down you know that’s a lie.

Thinking about what has happened as opposed to what could happen, is a specific kind of self-torture, like climbing a cliff and standing on the edge feeling the urge to jump. The intrusive nature of the past and our own minds is something that never really changes, we just become better at being able to compartmentalize them, put them into a locked box that you hide under your bed filled with old cinema tickets and photographs. You completely forget about the box until one day you check the date or watch an old film and stumble across the box only to have everything return to the way you felt when you had to put it away in the first place. It would be very easy to forget about the box, burn it, throw it away or do anything to forget. I’ve said before that people will do anything to work out while they feel bad but sometimes it’s as simple as opening a box.

If you’ve never seen ‘Love, actually” then first of all I hope the cave you live in is well insulated and secondly there’s a plot point throughout the course of the film where Alan Rickman and his wife, Emma Thompson are shopping for christmas gifts. She then catches him at an expensive jewelery counter buying a necklace and connects the dots. In the films final moments, she pushes to open a small, square box on christmas eve, the kind you would find a necklace in, only to find an old Joni Mitchell album. Further connecting the dots, we find out the necklace has been given to his promiscuous assistant and as Joni Mitchells ‘Both Sides Now’ plays we see her cry alone. Nostalgia is that jewelery sized box, we rush to unwrap it because we think it’s going to be something thoughtful and special and more often than not we find ourselves crying to a Joni Mitchell track. It sounds melodramatic but the sting of the idea that something could make us happy just by re-living it is so often and easily misunderstood.

Of course this experience is usually followed by a tub of ice-cream and a Bridget Jones marathon and the box gets returned. I’m not saying that the box should never be re-opened, that the alcohol should never be tasted again because much like these things, they pass. The sickness doesn’t last forever and the music does stop and eventually you’ll be able to feel warm and taste the sweetness again. Buy your own necklace, create your own box and create nostalgia that only ever makes you feel good again.