Ta-da! My first ever blog post!
I feel like I have a lot of ideas and thoughts swirling around in my head all the time and the notes app on my phone is getting crowded, so I might as well put pen to paper (or keyboard to computer screen?) and flesh them out more. Honestly, I don’t have any big expectations for what I want this blog to encompass. Really, I hope it helps me be more in touch with my feelings and creative ideas while I exercise some non-academic writing for once. And for you, friend and dear reader, I hope you feel like you’re getting to have a little conversation with me and see inside my brain a lil bit.
Shall we get started?
The category is....nostalgia!
I spent two months at home in Arkansas at the end of 2024, and now I’ve been back in Chicago for about 2.5 months. But for a few weeks now, I’ve really been longing for a home that does not exist anymore.
A few weeks ago, I was talking to a friend on the phone while they were scrolling through their camera roll. They shared some videos and told stories that they remembered based on old pictures, and I started looking through my camera roll and wished I had moved all the old images from my previous phones to this current one. I wanted to revisit my old memories too! So, I went and charged up the old iPhone that I used up until mid-2018.
After hours of charging the dead device, Quinn moved his Apple TV into the living room so we could share the photos from the old phone and scroll through them together on the big screen. I think we spent at least two hours doing this, stopping occasionally to share old stories, laugh a lot, and make comments about things and people in the photos/videos. While we looked through everything, a large wave of nostalgia hit me like a brick wall. And it has not gone away since then.
It’s like a rush of memories. So many things. So many details I forgot. But it’s also like stepping right into the past, because the old version of myself used to document EVERYTHING. If I wasn’t taking pictures, my friends or family always were! It’s like my 2015-2018 is fully encapsulated within that iPhone (and I cannot get them out of there no matter how hard I try). So now I’m left with just these memories, reflecting on how simple life really was and how much love used to surround me.
I’ve got photos upon photos of living at home with my parents and my three siblings. I know I couldn’t wait to move out then, but now I feel like I would pay any price to go back in time to relive a regular day where we were all together. Even if that regular day ended in a dinner consisting of only the color brown or gray (I’m looking at you, hamburger helper stroganoff).
And then I’ve got photos of so many friends! They range from pictures taken on a high school band trip to Florida to ones taken at 2 am after drinking all night on Dickson to ones of friends I’ll never have the chance to meet again.
One of my favorite videos in the camera roll was taken during a summer of house-sitting for the McKenzie’s. It’s nothing spectacular, and if anybody else watched it, they wouldn’t understand why I like it so much. In the video, I’m lying on the couch in the basement (which doubles as a recording & art studio) listening to Brian play the piano along with Bob Dylan’s “I Want You” on the record player. It’s a glimpse back into the day-to-day of that summer, just a regular night in the house. But once again, I feel like I would pay any price to go back in time for even an hour to live it again. To be so content and comfortable lying on that couch, listening to my friend play music, while we felt so independent and free having a whole house to ourselves for a few weeks. Now when I listen to “I Want You” or Blonde on Blonde, I think of Brian and I miss those summers.
There are other videos in the camera roll that stir up emotions for me, like the one from the night I went to go learn how to make ravioli with my friends Mason and Emily. Somehow I had completely forgotten that our friend Dubem was also at this dinner (maybe I drank too much wine? Maybe he only popped in for a bit at the beginning? I don’t remember). But there in my camera roll is a video of me and Dubem and Mason all rolling out the pasta dough together. Dubem passed away a few years ago, so when I saw this video I got a little misty eyed. I’ve rewatched that 5 second clip so many times in the past few weeks while asking myself how I could forget he was there that night.
Now, there are also some very funny memories I was reminded of and photographs documenting major plot points of my life. For example, my infamous 21st birthday...you can see a screenshot of a few texts that were sent that night (iykyk). Also, the quality is so bad, give me a break here, I took this photo of texts from an iPhone 6.
To wrap this up, it’s so hard to sit and reflect on how time passes by so quickly.
Nostalgia is such a powerful emotion. To me, it offers a gut-wrenching sadness and aching for a time long gone in return for only an ounce of comfort. My memories are intertwined with old feelings, songs, and specific locations. So I feel like if I give in to nostalgia and listen to those old songs or go to those old places, then I can torture myself with the saddest form of longing while gaining a small bliss from romanticizing the past. And this week I did exactly that. I woke up yesterday, feeling the most desperate heartache of nostalgia for my old self, and made a playlist of songs that would take me back in time (and unbeknownst to me, would exacerbate the sadness of missing something gone forever). And then I listened to that playlist for half a day while I wrote this blog post.
I know the memories in that old iPhone are of a home and a time and version of myself that doesn’t exist anymore. But I really can’t help but miss it.