I’m currently living two minutes from my childhood home. The place where I lived from the age of four to nineteen. The place where the foundational stiches of my very makeup were sewn into stories. Most I’ve forgotten. Until recently. I’ll be driving to work and be lampooned with memories of riding my bike down, what at the time felt like, the biggest hill ever, and now feels like a slight incline at best. Passing a particular patch of grass reminds me of the time I stood in dog poo on the way home in grade six and felt the same mortification ripple my solar plexus. I drove past a park the other morning and was reminded of the time I sat crying in my car listening to an Incubus mixtape because a boy hurt my feelings. I didn’t want to go home yet so I parked next to the beat up tennis court fence and with pen in hand purged my feelings onto a napkin, which I then ripped up and threw in the rusted council bin.
I sat outside my old house the other day, it looks different now, but the bricks are the same. The nostalgia is bittersweet and holds me in a loving embrace. I remember running barefoot across the road in summer and standing on the white lines for a moments reprieve so I could dash to my best friends house. I remember dashing back and standing on snails in the dark and squealing loudly. I remember hours on MSN, wild dreams being concocted, my dog being putting down, heartbreaks, Pacey Witter, my first kiss. I think about my Dad’s fortieth birthday party and marvel at the fact I’m nearly his age now. I wonder how this could possibly be because so much of me still feels like the fourteen-year-old girl who lived in this house.
Art by Ally Jones.
The pondering of nostalgia itself makes me think about the times where the memories living in places, or my senses, dance forward. The way smelling particular perfumes makes me think of my best friend and our wild London adventures, or the first girl I fell in love with. How listening to certain songs will transport my body to exact moments, Crazy in Love by Beyonce lands me in a field at Glastonbury Festival laughing with the boy I’d had a crush on since I was a fourteen. Rocket Love by Stevie Wonder delights me with memories of record players and the boy who took me on my first proper date, who romanced me, singing an impassioned rendition. Thumbing blu-tac between my fingers lands me in the toilets at The Zoo in The Valley in the middle of summer listening to reggae and flipping coins for free beers. So. Many. Memories.
I think of all the stories in each of my cells, in the soil where my feet have trod, and the people I’ve met. I feel like I don’t remember much, but I do, it’s all there. A life lived. I wonder what I’ll remember of this time in years to come. Probably not much of the mundanity or the stress. There’s something lovely in that for me, thinking of her, and the actions I make now being a love letter to for her. Her nostalgia.
To live life well now, for her then.
I like that thought.
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This weeks Pearler was created on the unceded lands of the Yugambeh people and Claire acknowledges and pays her deep heartfelt respect to First Nations Elders past and present. This always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.