A NEW TAKE ON NOSTALGIA

Leaving Chicago

*Note: If you’re reading this here and it’s different from the email that’s because I accidentally published an old version. Glad you made it to the current one.*

I decided to clip my nails on the last night I spent in my Chicago apartment. I pictured the clippers where I always keep them—below my mirror in a tiny ceramic shot glass gifted to me in Greece. I could imagine them perfectly as my body moved to fetch them. Then I remembered they weren’t there. Neither was the shot glass or the mirror. All of it was packed away. I used Julia’s nail clippers.

Normally, the realization that nothing was going to be the same again, that the room I’d built into a safe and comfortable space was dismantled, would have brought with it waves of sadness that I’d label as nostalgia and drown in for a week or os. But they didn’t come. The fact that nothing was where it used to be and soon I’d be in all sorts of new places myself, felt, at its worst, neutral.

Nostalgia or sentimentality has been a problem for me in my life. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time being sad for goodbyes that haven’t happened yet. I’ve turned positive memories into tormenting voices that made me wistful for the past. I’ve allowed the joy from the past to such the joy from the present. And perhaps worst of all, I ignored the feeling in my body telling me that being sad about the good things or turning the insignificant things (like a nail clipper) into something to be sad about, truly was not serving me, and went on being sad anyway.

There was a moment, the day I decided I would take the internship, that felt like cupping a heavy lock in my palm, clicking a skeleton key into place, and feeling the arc of metal pop against the flesh of my fingers. I was walking in Oak Park with one of my dogs tethered to my waist so I could keep my mittened hands in my pockets in the single digit temperatures. On a street I was familiar with, but that wasn’t on our normal walk route, I felt a wave of what I will call ‘nostalgia’. I looked at the street thinking: nothing will ever be this way again and felt wistful for a moment despite wanting to leave.

We rounded a corner and the bough of a pine arched over me, brushing my hat with its needles, and I felt the pale winter sun bathe my entire face in light that felt impossibly crisp to the point of cinematography. Sakhi was washed in it too, while she sniffed in the fallen needles, looking equally as crisp herself. It was like the sun had swooped in to remind me how vivid life could feel. The grip of nostalgia on my heart loosened so suddenly I might have gasped. I realized the feeling I was feeling was not sadness but abundance.

As if the words were being fed into my head by an external force, I thought: life can feel this way everywhere. there were good things, good people, and fun to be had, in every corner of the world. Moving on to the next thing isn’t sad, it’s inevitable. The only true pain might be that I cannot be everywhere at once. That sometimes I want contradicting things and must commit myself, temporarily at least, to the thing that feels most right. Hopefully this is also the thing that feels healthy.

This was a big moment for me, a person who was told once while expressing painful sentimentality, “But you like that sad shit.” I don’t believe I’ll never feel sentimental again and I’d never hope to be the case, but this shift toward contentment felt surprisingly solid and has stuck thus far.

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I didn’t cry much the week before leaving (Also new for me. I always cry at goodbyes). Only on the last day, did I cry. The first goodbye of the seven I’d say that day opened an emotional door inside me that contained far more than just my feelings about going. Driving back to the apartment with two good friends in the car, I cried at the red lights and got my shit ‘together’ when they turned green. “I’m not sad.” I kept saying through the tears. And I wasn’t.

Last night, sitting around a fire at a hostel in Santa Fe, a man named Austin who’s from Dallas talked about how sometimes the downside of hot springs was that people left their emotions in the pools. That was how I felt driving to my apartment from my childhood home for the last time. I felt like I was soaking in everyone else’s emotions, as well as my past emotions contained in Chicago’s borders.

That last night, I silently packed everything into Louise (my car) without any jarring feelings. Afterwards, I walked into the kitchen and pulled Julia into a hug. We stood there next to the stove like that for a long time until we were both crying. All I could think to do was try and hold all the events of the past (almost) two years we spent in this house together in my body for a moment. I imagined my ribcage ballooning up like a house, my insides becoming a mansion of the past temporarily.

Walking through the mansion’s rooms I saw myself falling in love, I saw my grandma dying, I heard laughter. I was enveloped in the silences that echoed when Julia and I had emotional airing out to do. I smelled bread baking the oven. I saw all the bags I’d packed and unpacked expand and deflate in rapid succession, marking all the times I’d left and returned home to this apartment. I saw many other things.

I was only a mansion for a moment before I opened my eyes and stared at the now blank wall behind Julia’s shoulder where my world map used to hang. I could never hold two years worth of change in my body at once. But I was glad to have tried. I’ve found that finding moments to mark time and celebrate makes it easier to move forward.

Two nights before I headed west, all my friends in Chicago came over for an evening to mark the moment of transition. When I’d graduated less than two months earlier, a visiting friend said we should throw a party but it didn’t feel right. I doubted people would come. I doubted my ability to host confidently. I didn’t want to be seen in the depressive hole I’d fallen into, I didn’t feel like dancing, and as it goes, no one was free. This time, in the same spirit as my key-to-nostalgia revelation, I reached out to all my friends saying I’d love to have them in my home, and they all said they wouldn’t miss it.

Now, I realize, people showed up for me because I allowed them to. I wanted them to, I told them so, and then I allowed them to see me off with their kind words. Words so kind they surprised me. I didn’t realize how much my friends valued me, even ones who hadn’t known me for long. I hadn’t realized how much they saw me even when I thought they weren’t looking.

One of my friends said they were grateful to have been able to bear witness to my intimate process of saying goodbye to loved ones. I am so freaking grateful to have friends that see the value in bearing witness to each other. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing we can do for each other, find ways to witness the real shit. Similarly, I think the best thing to do with feelings is feel them even when you don’t know what they are. Driving out of a snowstorm into Santa Fe into blue skies over Flagstaff, Adrienne Lenker sang “You don’t need to know why when you cry.”

I wasn’t crying, and I didn’t feel like crying, but I stand by the sentiment. I’m also taking back some of the bashing on Big Thief Iv’e done in the past.

I drove away from Chicago joking through the open window, “Don’t you worry, you’re not getting rid of me that easy. I love you!” And around the corner, my tears were dry and I was READY. Realizing on the road that I no longer had an apartment, I felt free.

Since leaving:

I hoped I wouldn’t fly into murmurations of sparrows who emerged from the grassy medians and swooped low over the I-80 in Nebraska.

I spent a night at Art Farm, was fed mac and cheese and cookies <3, dragged a mattress onto a kitchen table and slept there. I walked through the dry grass as the sun rose, feeling the energies of the people I’d spent time there with. I hope to write more about Art Farm soon, so I’ll leave it at that.

I overheard two women in Colorado Springs talking about living in New York and realized that people everywhere talk about that city.

All the people I was planning to stay with got covid but the change of plans felt just fine I found other friends to stay with. It always amazes me how wide my net can be if I actually cast it.

I slept at a hostel in Santa Fe with a fully stocked kitchen of free Whole Foods donations and met a guy named Jem who knows some people I worked with on at a pizza cart at a rodeo in Oregon last summer. Small world. We laughed for a few minutes about it and felt closer after that.

I drove through a snow storm in New Mexico and a truck came barreling so close to me that it splashed a thick layer of dirty slush all over my windshield. For those few blind seconds I feared all trucks passing would be like that but they weren’t.

Driving into the sun in Arizona, I remembered visiting my cousin when I was 13 and seeing mountains for the first time. I thought how to preserve that wonder. I also remembered driving my cousin’s car over 100mph for the first time (by accident) when I visited at age 16 and was glad I’d gotten better at using cruise control.

This time across the country, I drove just barely over the speed limit. Now I’m in Ojai, CA staying with a friend of a friend. Tomorrow I’ll make it to my destination. After hours of driving through the tans of the Mojave desert, the landscape gave way to grass speckled hills and fruit trees. Then, I descended into the valley where the green of the grass was so electric I was laughing. It didn’t feel like coming home, but it did feel like waking up.

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Thanks for reading everyone. I keep having this thought that I’m not writing about the stuff people are most curious about. I’ll write about what I’m actually doing when I get there and find out. In the meantime, I’m putting the other voices that my musings are boring or irrelevant, or that I can’t say my feelings ‘right’ out of my head. I started this newsletter with every intention of writing in spite of these voices. Please feel free to reach out with suggestions, questions, comments. Love you all. Until next time.