Saturday, November 10, 2007

Nostalgia


Long golden grasses bend in concert as I gaze out the bus window at the dwindling afternoon. The light lengthens as the sun descends in the sky. The wooden farmhouses shed shadows upon the fields over which they watch. A water tower breaks the flat line of the horizon; it would pierce the sky if it weren’t so awkward and bulbous. Inside the bus it is silent. The Greyhound station last hour was loud. I sat against a wall on the cracked concrete floor because the metal ribbed chairs looked less appealing. A man was yelling at the television anchorman about date rape drugs and strangulation, but on the bus it is quiet and cool and dark. We pass through a small town. A gas station, a couple of Mexican restaurants, and a church. It’s silent here too, but outside, in the town, everything is bathed in yellow light, soon to fade. 

After the town there are more fields and some cows. I see a roadside billboard that says, “Serengeti.” A gazelle prances across a full African sunset, one of those that fills the entire sky with red and orange the way sunsets must have done when man was new. I am going back. Everywhere I look, things are going back. Jet trails in the sky tell me that businessmen are flying home to see their families for the weekend. Small shops lock their doors and their owners load into pickups, turning onto roads that lead to kids and spouses. Calves congregate around their mothers, and even the grasses bend back toward the earth. I’m going back.


Going back means slowing things down. It means that washing dishes and listening to daily stories is important again. It means a full-size refrigerator and dependence on other people. I am returning to these things, but they aren’t the same things that I left when I moved to school in August. Once you leave something you create a break. The continuity you once felt isn’t there. It’s time to develop new relationships with both the new and the old. It doesn’t mean I can’t be here, it just means that I can’t be where I was.


I have risen and fallen through cycles of nostalgia quite regularly this year. Leaving my home and family has been difficult. I am very close to my mother and father and tied to the space, neighborhood, and atmosphere in which I grew up. Breaking these ties has at times released strong outpourings of longing and sadness. Going home is hard. It is in some ways much harder than just staying at school. When I see my house, my dog, my sister, my neighborhood, it reopens old springs that temporarily were dry. Returning to school is then very hard. It is when my longing is most poignant. When I am home I am connected. Re-breaking that connection is like re-breaking a bone: it’s painful but hopefully it will help to reset the pieces so abruptly fractured at first.

People talk about pure emotions – pure joy, pure happiness, pure love. Pureness connotes that there are no adulterating materials or essences adulterating. Pure gold would contain no other metals; if it did, it would be an alloy. Maybe it is possible to find a pure emotion – pure love would certainly do our world good – but nostalgia is most definitely an amalgam. Remembering home swirls forth desires and pains and youth and peace. Stockings used to hang over fireplaces, I know they did. Mothers and father used to cook favorites foods and serve it on real ceramic plates. There used to be stability in the mundane variations of daily routines. I was little. But then I remember the present. I remember that I am no longer really there, that I am here, I am at school, casting out on my own. And I remember that I can’t just remember this; I have to live this. All this is my nostalgia. Home, warmth, yellow light, family; pain, toil (I make them fond pain and toil); now, school, new relationships, the future. What will be?


I am going home this weekend. This weekend doesn’t have to be a weekend in the past. I don’t have to be living a forty-eight-hour memory. This weekend can be in the now: old things, familiar places, but new perspectives, new relationships. 
The light outside the bus has faded. Thin wisps of clouds stretch the sky like a thin blue bed sheet. The road ahead presses the hills flat and extends far out into the distance, at last converging at a point. The girl in front of me is giggling incessantly, and the girl beside is talking on her cell phone. I can feel home so concretely. Is this what nostalgia is? It doesn’t feel like a single emotion. But it makes me so sensitive to all emotions than arise. Nostalgia is a sensitivity evoked by the awareness of change. I certainly feel that. Maybe this weekend will help me to feel at home in this change.