As the candles dance in the forced breeze coming from the
frantically spinning fan, I sit on my narrow bed and wonder about the concept
of nostalgia. At any given point in time, we may experience a number of
different triggers that take our minds through a silent film of moments in our
lives. The flames flickering might remind me of my Stony Brook dorm room,
Arnob’s music in my ears might remind me of hazy winter mornings in Dhaka, the
touch of the wind on my bare shoulders might remind me of someone hundreds of
miles away… and yet, all these distant or disjointed memories come together at
the same time, making a whole new memory. Not just a whole new memory, but a
cacophony of sensations: different languages colliding and conglomerating,
colors, smells, touches, emotions, all of them crashing one after the other
upon the mind, vying for dominance. What does one do with all these decapitated
memories? Do we let them build upon each other and create a veritable monster
of nostalgia? Or do we brush them off, throwing them in a pile of Unwanteds and
just keep looking for newer memories? Is it possible to simply have a memory
and not feel nostalgia? Is nostalgia the thing that makes a good memory good?
I would have no problems with nostalgia if it
didn’t have the feelings associated with it; if it didn’t have that which
defines it. Why can one not listen to a song without feeling one’s insides
melting vein by vein, tearing away all shreds of sensibility? Why can one not
smell something without thinking of nothing but that certain someone’s fingers,
entwining and caressing, tugging at the heart? Why do we fall prey to such
emotions when memories are really nothing but neurons and nerve impulses? It
would be pointless to wonder what our worlds would be like without memories;
but what if we lived without nostalgia? Would that make us more efficient at
planning our present and our future, since we would spend less time upon the
past? Would it not make us happier in a way, since we wouldn’t be spending any
time or emotions on feeling sad or lonely or depressed? Technically, perhaps
that could be the case. But something tells me that life would lose all its
hope, all its charm, all its indescribable bits of honeyed happiness that we
hold so dearly to our hearts. That must be where nostalgia lies; that must be
the purpose of nostalgia. To remind us, with not just a small stab at our
hearts, that those fragments of memories that float to us on lonely, hot nights
like tonight are actually proofs of life’s cruel beauty. They come to us to
make us pause in our mindless days and nights and remember things that once
made us love life, or gave us hope, or gave us the reasons that we needed to
get through our days. The after-effects of nostalgia are a bit harder to deal
with, but I suppose if we can sort through the collage of memories one by one,
we might come to look at them pleasantly, and stow them away for another day
when we might need that memory… Perhaps I can yet learn to pick and choose my
nostalgia. Until then, it seems appropriate that I’ll keep echoing Pink Floyd: How
I wish, how I wish you were here….
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