Chapter 5: Nostalgia
.35 grams of dry, powdered mushroom.
In my studio. Lights off. On the floor atop a mountain of pillows and blankets. Eyes closed. Listening to George Winston.
A cat asleep at my head.
As a child, my mother would frequently play the album, “Winter Into Spring,” and I suppose I was feeling nostalgic. George Winston’s work is instrumental. Dark notes. Intense crescendos.
The music of my collective childhood homes ran the gamut from Heart and Tom Petty to Neil Young and Fleetwood Mac. Many of their songs still grace my playlists today. But there’s something about the removal of vocals that resonates with the soul. No lyrical agenda to guide your emotions. No love lost or coming-of-age angst. No deep meaning behind the words to debate with your friends.
Remove the vocals and it’s just you and the sound.
I was looking for a center. A root that tunnels deep into the core of who I am.
The cat at my head began to purr. Without opening my eyes, I reached up to pet her. As is common for this particular cat of mine, she grasped onto my hand with both her paws, pulled me closer to her chest, and laid her head directly in my palm.
She’s a sweet one.
We stayed like that, her and I, while George’s music filled the air.
In the black place behind my eyelids, the ripples of colors began. Nothing overly bright, just that gentle rolling shift of tones that I’d grown accustomed to, signaling the time to relax. Because the mushroom was with me now.
I didn’t enter this meditation session with an agenda, but perhaps my choice of music had been a subconscious request.
When I think of my childhood, I remember it like an overview. The blurb on the back of a book cover. And though I remember events, they are mostly from adolescence. Middle school and high school.
There are black spots in my youngest years. Sometimes I can’t tell if I have memories of those times at all, or if I’m clinging to childhood photographs, the images masquerading in my brain as actual, living memories. The brain, like bipolar disorder, can be a trickster.
With a cat asleep in my palm, and piano chords filling the room, and a rolling vibration flooding my skin, I began to receive snapshots. Like an 8mm home movie. Frame by frame. A few inches of film missing and stitched together here and there.
My instinct is to say that I saw myself as a child that day, but it would be more accurate to say that I felt myself as a child. I felt the silliness of being that little girl. Of building sandcastles, shaking shrimp out of seaweed. I saw the streets I grew up on and the clothes I wore. My favorite bathing suit—bright blue with a large yellow fish across the belly. I felt the longing for that little bathing suit on the day I discovered I’d grown out of it. I saw my blonde hair, cropped to my shoulders by my mother’s overzealous scissors, twisted by saltwater into tangled ropes falling across my face. I felt the pine needles sticking to my wet feet. I remembered the smell of the islands. And avoiding the scary and “icky” seagrass as I splashed through the shallows. I saw my mother rubbing suntan oil into her skin at the beach. I saw my father’s feathered brown hair blowing in the wind, his eyes creasing behind his sunglasses when he smiled.
I saw it all as a recipe—every ingredient, every pinch of salt—that made me exactly who I am today.
Like anyone, I’ve gone through some shit. More than some, less than others. But I’ve always lived by a personal theory that if given the opportunity to change something about my past, I would change nothing. Even throughout a lifetime of depression and bipolar disorder, I’ve always somehow liked myself. My crazy brain makes life harder than it should be. But my crazy brain is still an element of what makes me me.
If you changed even one thing about your past, it would have a trickle down effect that would change everything. Like a butterfly flapping its wings to cause a tsunami on the other side of the world. Some people may prefer a tsunami to wash everything away. I do not. I don’t know if something in my childhood caused the disorder in my brain, or if I was simply born with the wrong chemicals, the wrong triggers. But without my disordered brain, I would think differently than I do today. Which means I would create my art differently. Or maybe not at all. Would I still have had the complexity of thought to write entire novels? Maybe not. Would I still feel and love as deeply as I do?
Like a scene in a sappy movie, I saw that little girl—that child with the cropped saltwater tangles—and I hugged her. We became one and I was filled with the understanding that she was still very much with me. We were the same person, here and now. She had not grown up. She was not hardened by life. And she was not a fabricated memory from a faded photograph. She was vibrantly alive inside me.
I began to weep.
Warm tears streamed down my cheeks to pool in my ears. But I did not wipe them away. And I did not open my eyes. I let the tears fall. I wasn’t crying because I was sad or happy. That’s too simple an explanation. I cried from the complexity of it all. I cried because I had just experienced a new emotion. One that has no definition.
The word “nostalgia” is too linear. We think of that word to mean something akin to remembering the past. But there is so much complexity wrapped up in nostalgia if you really allow yourself to understand it. There is longing and there is gratitude. There is understanding. Appreciation. A recognition and acknowledgment of the passing of time. Seasons and beauty. Death and rebirth. Something distant and yet shockingly present. You want to grab it, wrap your arms around it and hold on tight. But nostalgia is a ghost. You cannot keep it.
But you never lost it either.
Sometimes we just need to find it again.
By the time I opened my eyes, the tears had stopped. The sunlight through the windows pulled me out of my head and back to the living world, where ghosts are better hidden.
I spent a few extra moments reliving the experience. I didn’t want to forget it. I couldn’t let it slip back into the hidden drawers of my brain.
Perhaps sensing the shift of energy the room, my cat began to stir, and I realized she had slept in my palm through the whole experience. Nearly a full hour.
I turned onto my side and began to scratch her ears. She purred. Loudly. Her eyes are large and richly brown, and she looked down at me with so much love. Again, she wrapped her paws around my hand and pulled it to her chest.
This is perfection, I thought. This cat at my head. She wants nothing more in this life than to be right here, right now. She knows she is loved. And she knows there is nothing else.
Her fur was aglow, each individual hair ignited by sunlight.
And for the second time that day, I cried. But it wasn’t from complexity of thought or some deep life realization.
This time it was simple. I cried because I was happy.
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