Nostalgia is one hell of a drug

and i’ll never be sober

Nostalgia = nostos + algia

home + pain

In Greek mythology, nostos refers to the homecoming of a hero. When given the suffix -algia which means pain, as in fibromyalgia (literally"muscle and fibrous connective tissue pain"), it literally becomes ‘pain for home’. This pain or longing is akin to homesickness but much broader.

And where is home for me? Home is anywhere I’ve ever been, anything I’ve ever held.

Excerpt from ‘The Rough Draft Diaries’ (unpublished)

I find myself longing for that which has come and gone—people, sights, cities, foods, experiences—because at one point or another, despite their shortcomings and my own, part of them lived through me and part of me through them. After having lived in Lisbon, the city’s antique charm is stored in my memory’s eye and will evolve with me. Sure what I perceive will over time patina but that’s the subjectivity of intimacy: my perception is all I have. So too, will the people I encountered there—friends, lovers, administrators of my residency, store clerks, bartenders, street dwellers, transient tourists—live on with me and furnish the rooms in my heart and mind reserved for memories of Lisbon. Ghosts of the past are fixtures of the present after all.

Before I left New York, Mari invited me to celebrate her cousin—and my new friend— Dauda’s birthday. I had just made the twenty-minute trek from my apartment in Manolo Blahnik kitten heels, a hand-me-down from

Iayana Elie

. The brownstone stoops locked behind their gates for the night, I found the narrow edge of a step and parked myself to eat half my dinner. Broke but stylish, I felt like something of an alternate-universe Carrie Bradshaw. Soon after, I found myself in the secret garden of a local bar that I’d passed a million times. My pores probably secreted oil and grease in the thick New York summer heat but that didn’t matter because I felt like I was in a memory that had yet to unravel.

When I met Mari at a bar earlier this year, she had a familiar essence. Not like a friend but maybe a model I would’ve seen on America’s Next Top Model, or in campaigns during the 2010’s. When she introduced me to her cousin Dauda on a night out in the spring, he reminded me of my father: bald with dark skin, slender and personable with that distinctive West African look, but edgier and of the current times. I examined him for signs that he was secretly my father. I admit I marked him guilty until proven innocent. My biases were confirmed when I learned they were born under the same Zodiac sign, Cancer. Only after, I divorced myself from my nostalgia for what I never truly had—or had only briefly and long ago—did I come to appreciate him for who he is.

In my orbit was one of Dauda’s many cool friends. Before I could get in my own head about the friend’s coolness, he quickly revealed that his cool was the genuine, at ease cool, not the nonchalant, aloof type I’d been berated with in so many of my interactions in this city. We jumped over the introductory hurdles of Where are you from? and What do you do? before my answer to the latter (I’m a writer) piqued his interest. He asked me what types of things I wrote about. Mainly fiction, I said. We chatted a bit more on the topic of my work before I commented on how the back garden, lined with fairy lights and shrouded in foliage and humid air, was nostalgic.

‘Nostalgic,’ he slowly began, ‘that’s interesting.’

I tried to follow his formulating thoughts with my eyes.

‘Are you a nostalgic person?’

‘I think I am,’ I reluctantly confessed as if caught red-handed. I explained how nostalgia lives in my bones; it’s part of my composition. Then I pulled up a passage of my work discussing nostalgia.

From ‘The City that Rushes to Wait’

He told me that he posed the same question to other people and they had varying answers. Many said they either live in the now or the future, not so much hung up on the past. This struck me as strange since I had not previously considered that my nostalgic state was not standard. For a second, though, I felt as if I was being the wrong way.

But then it dawned on me that my inclination towards the past is what informs my perspective. That I could see twinkling fairy lights tethered to a wooden fence and be reminded me of scenes from my childhood in which fireflies illuminated the night is something to be appreciated. For better or for worse, nostalgia and my unflinching attachment to the past color my world—who would I be if I denied myself the delight and dread that accompanies that?