Fictitious Nostalgia by Khristina Cabrera (17, New Jersey)*

Time and again I find myself fascinated by the falsehood of memory. It seems that each detail of the past is blurred and indistinct in my mind, without a solid form to cling to, regardless of my continued determination to take a particular moment and press it precisely into the various folds of my brain. 

---

​It is in such a falsehood that a fictitious nostalgia is born—or as I like to think of it, the recollection of a certain feeling that had never been experienced in the first place. I am sitting on a train, familiar in its unfamiliarity, watching the thick leaves of the nearby trees roll past like wet paint dripping on a canvas; I am on the bench of some unknown city, watching the people walk by me and past me and through me; I am everywhere and everything at once, or so it seems. At the same time, I am nowhere, and I am nothing. Reality is a fantasy to me when it exists in my mind.

The nostalgia comes back in waves in any room I am in, in every moment that I catch myself tuning out the world. Sometimes I am nostalgic for last summer, and why? Last summer, I was unhappy. Last summer, I cried in front of my sister’s boyfriend after hearing a song for the first time. Last summer, my heart felt like a heavy balloon expanding in the space between my ribs, ready to burst, because I thought I might like a girl and I thought she might like me, but it was so impossible to fathom the idea that I might be important to someone that I never fathomed it at all. (Even now, I am incapable of swallowing the thought.) I listened to psychedelic music and I frantically wrote stories like I needed them to survive and I read The Virgin Suicides because I thought I might find comfort in its obscurity, like mistaking water for wine. I longed to be Lux Lisbon, but why? 

After that summer I could never tell for sure if I was suicidal or not, if I valued life for what it was or not. Nothing had gone particularly wrong. I had a comfortable life and a new job and stories to write. I was still sad. 

After that summer I swore to myself that I would get better, because I had to. There is nothing distinct to reminisce on, yet I still do. Perhaps I miss the sudden inspiration that would strike me in my worst of times, the one that allowed me to lift my hand and make strokes across my paper, the motivation that pulsed like a heartbeat, helping me craft something worth reading. Perhaps I miss knowing that I was feeling. 

Sometimes I reminisce on the autumn that followed, the memories growing even more blurry and distant, so much that I cannot connect them to my own life. I remember the time we made two rounds around the parking lot in her red Nissan, waiting for my dad to pick me up from field hockey practice. I remember her hand on the small of my back as we watched the football game under the neon Friday lights. I remember her leaning over the middle console to kiss me--can I kiss you in my car?—and the first thought I had when her warm mouth touched mine, that kissing was nothing like I’d thought it would be. Then that is when I stop myself from remembering further, because the rest of the autumn was not good for either of us and that became the first and only time we kissed or even hung out.

But sometimes—and only sometimes—I am nostalgic for those times, and it makes me angry to think that I would want to return to a time when the banks of inspiration to write had run dry, and I couldn’t bring myself to do much of anything. 

Why is it that we are nostalgic for moments we did not enjoy? Do we find a sadistic pleasure in punishing ourselves this way, or is there no real answer to this question, and we feel all things without any particular reason? 

I don’t know if I will look back on today and be nostalgic for the time when I stayed up late to write down a scattered stream of consciousness, just because I felt like I needed to. Today, I don’t know if I am happy or sad. I suppose that in the end, it doesn’t matter. With time, minds will twist and contort every word jotted down and turn them into a glittering illusion that people will come to miss, even while knowing the truth.

​