Nostalgia: The Enemy of a Teen in her Last Year of being a Teen.

I celebrated my nineteenth birthday last April 21st. It’s the first birthday since 2015 that my family and I spent at home. Last year, that time around, we were island-hopping the Hundred Islands. This year, I was eating spaghetti in the living room of our house while my dad watches whatever it was that he was watching at the time on Netflix.

If there’s one thing that three of months of being stuck inside taught me, it’s that you can never spend too long inside your house unless you are purposefully driving yourself insane. No, don’t laugh, it’s true. This is the longest (that I can remember) that I have spent with only my family members for company and, no offense meant because I love everyone in the house, they have all successfully driven me to insanity.

Hence, this piece of writing that you are reading.

The night before my birthday I managed to convince myself to stay up late (like I always do during the nights of birthdays past) and wait for my family to greet me. Once the clock striked twelve, they all filed one-by-one into my room to give their short greetings. We went downstairs to eat the macaroni salad my aunt had prepared earlier in the evening. We ate a little, laughed a little, my sister sang me the Happy Birthday song, and then I made my way back upstairs to lay down on my bed.

Nineteen. I rolled the word around in my head as I was laying later on, still awake at three in the morning and staring at the dents of the upper bunk where my aunt was already fast asleep. Nineteen years old, that was what I was at that very moment in time. One year away from twenty years old, which means I am close to completing the second decade of my life. I twisted and turned, trying to grasp the reality of it. Turns out you don’t have to try too hard to stay up late when your brain trying to comprehend old age can do all the work for you.

My dad prefers older music. Unlike my mom, who is trying her best to stay young at heart, my dad never bothers for the new pop hits. Where my mom listens to Maroon 5 and sings along with my brother and I when we sing ‘Stacy’ by Quinn XCII, my dad would be found listening to classic bands such as The Beatles or Deep Purple instead. A running joke in our family is that whenever my dad is in charge of the music, you will almost certainly hear ‘Nights in White Satin’ by The Moody Blues at least once.

Weekends during my youth often meant that old music would be playing in the house for the entire day. My dad loved to collect CDs. We used to have a rack filled with nothing but his CDs. He’d pop something in the player, usually The Beatles, and then listen all day to his favorite songs. That’s what growing up in that house was like. It was reading my book by the stairs while The Beatles softly croons from the CD player.

Here’s a not-so-secret secret: I like most of my dad’s favorite songs. Probably because they were what I grew up on, or maybe because I was brainwashed by my dad into liking them. Whatever the reason is, I really like my dad’s music. On the day of my nineteenth my dad was in charge of the music. He was playing ‘Late Again’ by Stealers Wheel while we were all in the living room eating. I kept pausing my eating because I was singing along, and my mom towards the end looked at me and jokingly said, “you know what, I really am proud that you know a lot of your dad’s songs.’

I’ve been listening to a lot of old music lately. My recent Spotify searches has mostly been music from the 70s, 80s, and, what I dub to be the last era of high tier pop music, the 2010s. I’d find myself more often than not laying down in bed or mindlessly drawing while listening to the songs my dad used to play back in that old house. The CD rack, over half of them The Beatles’ greatest hits. The image of a little me in my mind’s eye, sitting by the stairs with a book in my hand mouthing the lyrics along.

I cannot explain what prompts nostalgia any more than I can explain why I think the pop music of 2010 is better than the pop music of 2020, or why it’s so difficult to remember what your favorite book is when you’re being asked what your favorite book is. Nostalgia is as random as random can get. It comes and then it goes. Sometimes it leaves right away, like the postman dropping off mail. Sometimes it stays for a very long time, like the scars on your knees from when you fell off your bike.

Nostalgia is the mold that grows in the corner of your house; you notice it once and then elect on ignoring it. The next time you notice it again it is already too late, and the entire wall of your house needs to be demolished because of the infestation of mold. Nostalgia seeps into your bones as quickly as a thief in the night. The ache festers, and then it aches, and then it lingers.

I want to be a kid again. I want to be four years old, playing with the kids outside my Lola’s house, my only problem being scraped knees and the hunger in my stomach. I want to be six years old, pulling pranks with the other first graders and laughing about random things while sipping overpriced drinks from the canteen. I want to be eleven years old, dancing with my friends during our Christmas Party and exchanging gifts excitedly because the novelty of exchanging gifts hasn’t worned out yet. I think somewhere in all of us, there is always a little part that doesn’t ever want to grow up. I don’t want to be nineteen. I don’t want to grow old.

Nostalgia picked the absolute worst time to reside in my mind. Being stuck at home was like an open invitation to it. Like the rays of a lighthouse calling the seamen to shore. It’s here and it sucks and it absolutely hurts. Being alone, in my room for most of the day, surrounded by the things I collected during my youth — books I used to love to read, exam papers I haven’t thrown out yet, movie tickets that I can’t bear to part with, photo albums that show how cute I was when I was a baby. Everything in my room is a testament to how long I have already lived, and these reminders hurt me more than they bring me comfort.

Nostalgia, at last, is the longing for the things that can no longer be. It’s sitting down on the floor and listening to old songs and trying to recall in perfect detail how it felt like to be a happy child. It’s looking outside the window, staring at the shifting colors of the sky and wondering at what point in your life did you stop seeing your childhood friends. It’s finding yourself wishing that you were young again while the pressing of reality burdens your shoulders with every passing day. Nostalgia is bittersweet in the sense that it is the temporary happiness in the face of incredible sadness. It is the comfort that creates discomfort; like a photograph full of happy people with smiling faces in an event you can no longer perfectly recall. Like the candle on top of your birthday cake that you don’t want to blow out, because it makes the passing of time all the more real.

This is a letter that I wrote to myself the night after my birthday. It’s not as good as I’d like to think it is, nor is it as good as the pieces I usually write, but it’s raw and is an unfiltered stream of thought that is exactly me.

May you find even just a modicum of comfort in reading it the way I did by publishing it.