heatherbeck
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Auguries.
🕑 Added 2020-09-04 01:18:16 +0000 UTCOh, anachronimity. You know, I have a storage room deep in the American south. I still pay rent on it. And with each month it goes by, and with each rent check that I pay, I forget, more and more, what the fuck is actually in there. I suppose it’s all of my material possessions. But... if somebody were to show up here right now, hand me a pencil and a piece of paper, and say “You have 10 minutes. Write down what you want, and it will be teleported here immediately. But only the things that you remember, and the things that you write down...” The list would be very short.
Nostalgia, as Mad Men would have us believe, comes from the Greek, meaning “the pain of an old wound.” There hasn’t been enough time that has passed between me and my things for me to feel nostalgic about them… But there is nostalgia, nonetheless. The longer you’re away from somewhere, the more you ache for it. I think part of the pain comes from the fact that you, also, forget about it.
And, it’s because home, when it exists as an idea, is an ever-shifting thing. We think of home as four walls and a roof. Immovable, solid, permanent. But when it’s less tactile, when the brain has already cut the electricity for the season, and put tarps of plastic over the big pieces of furniture so they don’t gather dust... home exists as an idea.
It’s not that you forget about what home was. It’s just that, while you were gone, home changed.
I guess, in some form or another, most of us, if we are lucky, all have these auguries of innocence. We all fancy ourselves as being kids in a movie from the 1980s, who rode around their inconsequential town on bicycles, unearthing and solving conspiracies that threatened the very nature of the world itself. Something delightfully Spielberg-ian about the whole thing. But that was idealism. Nothing wrong with that.
But, it wasn’t that way. That’s what was shown to us, but it was never quite that dramatic. And besides, when we all stopped being 13, life moved on. We all went our separate ways, like all the characters in the second half of the “It” movies.
If you stay away from “home“ for too long, I guess you have to come to one of two conclusions: that home is something that used to exist, and that you can spend the rest of your life searching for; or that home is… Where you make it? Where the heart is? Where you keep your Le Creuset?
I’ll be honest with you, you guys. I’ve been fairly transient my entire life. Not quite to military brat levels, but I’ve moved around a bit. And recently, with the way things have been going, I don’t know if I know where home is anymore. I’ve got a 5 x 5 storage room in Atlanta. In it, I’ve got some winter clothes that I desperately wish I had right about now. A really cool coffee table/trunk. Books, books, books, books, books. Some wallhangings. And I know, a lot more… But I just can’t remember.
A couple of old school cameras I used to mess around with… One of which is a ‘70s-era 8mm film camera that made the exact same sound this video makes.
How weird, that a noise like that, when heard by a girl who grew up in the age of those big bulky over-the-shoulder electronin camcorders, can still inspire an idea of nostalgia.
Or, maybe that’s just what I was told nostalgia sounds like?
Comments
Steve Pappas
my nostalgia comes in moments and then goes away as I go back to celebrating how great life really is ... i just have to stop and smell the roses when I got longing for the 'old days'
glog
nostalgia = return ache
Michael Colby
at some point, perhaps when we live long enough in enough places, home becomes wherever we are for whatever duration of time we are at that place.
martin allen
Funny--I've got a ton (or more) of stuff back South too--but I'm going to try and reclaim as much as I can, after another stimulus check (now that we're pretty sure to get one) AND my tax refund...
Stephen Prandy
I had a camcorder.
