What a while since I have written. Getting more than 20 minutes of momentum and focus has been a sincere challenge. While I’ve finally gotten out of the house, year two of this pandemic has unfolded like a rickety jungle drawbridge, swaying and crumbling as I move across. We are all in an action film, deciding whether safety lies forward or backwards. Scamper backwards and you need a new plan for crossing. Charge ahead and you’re in an unfamiliar new land.
I spent August in America, after a two year absence. In addition to stress about COVID compliance, I logged quality time with old flats, food haunts and people I love. It was especially fun to do this with my child. I began many hugs by crowing, “SCIENCE!” These carefully coordinated interactions were a joy and a relief — fulfilling the Queen of England’s weirdly soothing pandemic promise: “we will meet again.”
I want to name the quaver in her voice, which has defined our enforced separations, a kind of nostalgia. My received definition is a warm feeling for the past. But that’s not quite right. Though I never attended an institution so nostalgic that it taught me Latin, I’ve learned the word literally combines home — nostos—and pain—algos.
This resurrected my suspicion that nostalgia is a bad feeling — all pain. I am unmoved by the kitsch of mason jars and flared trousers, or earnest #tbt sentimentality. The MAGA movement is sinister as hell. As a black woman, returning to the inadequate past is unappealing to me. Mostly, I have feared this peculiar form of envy, my present self pressed against the shop window of a former life, unable to access it. Better to move forward than run back.
But nostalgia reflects a deep familiarity—knowledge so complete that a flicker of the thing can summon the whole experience. I will never forget the smell of small fires at dusk in Nairobi. When I hear certain Daft Punk, I think of the F train in the miserable heat of June. I recently purchased a ten-foot mobile phone charging cable (recommend!), which brought back evenings pacing my teenaged bedroom with a landline coiled around a finger.
Even as I accepted the pain of migration and distance, the pandemic left me eager for these madeleines (bodega pico de gallo, the glow of a weights session at my former gym). So I went back to my first apartment in Paris and my last apartment in New York. I found myself back before the altar where I was married, to redo the whole process, this time without ornament.
If it is possible to appreciate something without taking on the emotional freight of its being gone, it is also possible to repave the roads of your past with completely new memories (call it mental gentrification). For example, I’ve experienced “La Grande Jatte” at Chicago’s Art Institute as a tool for learning the past perfect tense in French, a Ferris Bueller joke with my college boyfriend, a hypnotic study in tiny dots for my tiny child.
And it is possible to leave things behind completely if you choose. In Rachel Cusk’s The Last Supper, about a season in Italy, she reflects: “it is better to commit yourself to the life of knowledge than to cling on to the world of possession.” I marvel at her ability to generate philosophies from the everyday — after all, she is writing about her kids’ tantrum after leaving a temporary vacation rental. Better to have loved and lost, she is saying.
I spent a summer night in Rome myself, playing Scroll, Call Delete — a dangerous game for smartphones (credit to someone in my London gang, I’ve forgotten). The rules: you must scroll through your phone, eyes closed. When another participant yells “stop” you must either call the contact, or delete them on the spot. It was thus that I said goodbye to my Washington gynecologist and a college nemesis, and reconnected with a conference taxi buddy. An old friend—hand to god—landed on my mom. In an ancient, empty city, we cried, sighed, told the stories of the deletions and the keepers, and felt somehow that we were winning the endless battle between the past and the present.
Cusk’s point needs a tweak; absence is not dispossession any more than presence is ownership. My own child is learning slowly the idea of object permanence — that though I am not always there, I exist. The same goes for what you and I have missed in this long journey. If we are lucky, the people persist. The places persist. And even if they don’t, the knowledge persists. Nostalgia is there to remind us that we are capable of building monuments if we choose.
A good enough time to share that I am starting a new day job. I’m joining Amazon in London, building its video business across the African continent. I’m hyped to be back among the creatives telling stories from and for Africa. I’m gaining new dealmaking tools and colleagues. I’ll plan to keep writing here when the mood strikes. But I don’t want to completely resume operations as per 2019. I’m different — you, too — and releasing former patterns feels healthy. My mother is always saying how twenty children cannot play together for twenty years. I disagree, a little — but what she means is that you gotta move forward.
Bonus list of future nostalgia triggers from the pandemic era:
My weighted blanket. A pharmaceutical free anxiety solution.
One Pot, One Pan, One Planet by Anna Jones. I reformed my inner jazz cook via these no-miss recipes that explicitly lower stress on the environment.
Clubhouse: I spent weeks breastfeeding to the French language chatter —and then never opened the app again.
Tennis. On again off again for 30 years, but now on again.
The 7-Up series. When we lost director Michael Apted, I dove into the eight documentaries tracing a group of seven year olds throughout their varied British lives.
Enjoy the Silence. A perfect, timeless earworm that marked my first real dance party after the long winter.
Lastly, a summer’s worth of #twonouns pubs, to make up for lost time.
Until we meet again,
Dayo