Lonely Nostalgia

New Year’s Day used to be one of my favorite days of the year. The one day of absolutely zero guilt where I could lounge on my couch the entire day binge watching TV, gorging on take-out, and feeling a rare freedom from the suffocating expectations of productivity to prove my value to the world. However, after almost ten months of a once cherished holiday tradition morphing into my daily routine, I can no longer find joy in the comfort of exhausting rest. Much like the craving for an annual slice of cake on my birthday turned to repulsion after having it forced-fed day in and day out, the once decadent sweetness of New Year’s Day has grown stale after months of poisoning me with an emptiness that has blended the warmest days of summer into the greyest winter mornings with only my expanding pants size to timestamp it. 

Besides spending the morning of January 1st confined to my bed for the first seven hours of the day with a crippling hangover while viewing my friends’ and enemies’ Instagram stories from the night before or re-watching the Karen Huger press conference episode of The Real Housewives of Potomac, New Year’s Day also provided me with a solemn moment of reflection from the year past. I often feel like an elderly widow sitting alone on a rocking chair in my Antebellum home lamenting through photo albums of my late husband who died fighting in the Falklands every time I scroll through my camera roll of edited thirst-traps and staged group photos from the past twelve months. These photos, many of whom never saw the light of daymode on my newsfeed, remind me of the good times I experienced that year even when my bad memories try to overshadow them. While most of the time they remind me how much one of my eyes closes significantly more than the other when I smile or that overhead lighting is truly technology’s greatest failure, they also remind me that I’m not alone. For every snapshot on my phone is a reminder of a moment in time shared with my loved ones that we attempted to encapsulate our time together as a reminder that joy still does exist on days when it feels impossible to remember it. 

That isn’t going to be the case this year. That isn’t going to be the case this year. 

2020 has been a year that none of us will ever be able to forget yet it is also a year that has given us next to no memories. For whatever goals I had set in motion during the ambitiously warm days of February this year were completely thwarted in the events that would follow in the weeks to come. Every vacation to destinations that still exist but are unreachable; every concert that TicketMaster refuses to refund my ticket to; every romance that never blossomed because you never got that first date; I felt my lust for life sink into a grey purgatory of postponement. The realization that my potential for success in 2020 was lost was like the acceptance that your cat had ran away and wasn’t returning; there’s no exact event that causes you to reach the ultimate conclusion, you simply wake up one day without hope anymore. 

Not to say that life didn’t happen for me at all this year during COVID, in fact I experienced some of the most catalyst moments of my life during these trials that forced me to ask myself if I really did wish to continue with life or not. But for myself, as well as with many others who were not able to quarantine with their loved ones, I experienced these moments alone. While it is true that we all do venture through life on our own from the beginning till the end, the most exciting moments we experience between birth and death are seldomly experienced without the presence of others. To share overwhelming emotions of joy, excitement, tragedy, and pain with another person at the same time creates a unifying bond cementing for us what it truly means to be human. 

As I sat on my couch day in and day out checking in with my friends by sending them variations of the Gossip Girl “Go-piss-Girl” memes my most passionate of emotions were reduced to variants of iMessage reactions and Wendy Williams gifs. The visceral sounds of my friends’ laughter and weeping were substituted by the hollow buzzing of my phone’s vibration keeping me company. The lack of milestone life moments such as elaborate birthday parties or holiday traditions evaporated the very concept of time to me. I remember the events of the Murder Hornets’ arrival, Bernie Sanders dropping out of the 2020 Presidential election, and cancelling Tyra Banks over 15+ year old America’s Next Top Model clips out of sheer boredom but genuinely could not tell you if these events took place in April or in September. Because when your daily routine consists almost entirely of masturbating and doing the dishes, does it even really matter? 

Even when I was lucky enough to find the unexpected moment of joy during lockdown, my inability to share such a warm sentiment with others stripped away the layers of my excitement to merely a flicker of serotonin pumping through my system. One of the top moments of my year was during a walk I saw arguably the most fucking beautiful raccoon of all time that I swear on my life was blond. Even as someone who pretentiously has the title of “writer” in my Instagram bio I am still to this day incapable of putting into words how beautiful both this trashy woodland creature and that moment truly were. No matter how desperately I tried to detail this latchkey moment in my life to my friends over text and zoom they will never be able to fathom the excitement I felt in that moment, and that saddens me. 

Nostalgia is the main differentiator between reminiscing vs. mourning when discussing memories. Even the worst remembrances can be transformed into hilarious stories years later when being shared with the people who experienced them with you at the time now with newfound perspectives. But when it is only you by yourself to reflect on, these mementos of the past become deflated into hollow reminders of times past. 

I recall last year running into a girl I once went to university with years ago who I had almost completely forgotten about. After we departed I instinctively reached for my phone to message my friends about the unexpected run in and to gossip over the good ol’ days of 2013, only to be reminded that I haven’t kept in contact with anyone from that chapter of my life. Not a single person I knew had ever met that girl and thus would have no affiliation with this bizarre occurrence in my day. With no one to share this story with, I returned my phone to my pocket and continued on as if this highlight of my week never happened at all. This is the first time I have ever shared this, because when else would I have reason to? 

I no longer say “when this is all over” because every day I lose faith that it will ever fully be over, but I will say I look forward to the days when we can talk more candidly about the events that transpired during 2020 without the fear of scrutiny. While events such as the viral video of a New York circuit house party back in May aptly titled by gay twitter as “The Meth Gala” taught many the common sense of discretion under fear of the glower from the public eye, it still did little to prevent people from acting upon their desires for mass social interactions, just without posting it online for once. In the same way we speak now of every cringeworthy moment of our adolescence in middle school with humor that once brought us immense shame, I long for the days that we may humbly admit the secret and questionably legal shenanigans that kept us sane during the gloomiest days of COVID. I don’t believe shame is always necessarily a bad thing, it often at times was the only thing that kept many of us in check during our most desperate moments during lockdown to act within our best judgement. My only hope is that one day, if it’s not too ambitious, that we may look back at our actions, decisions, and memories from this year without feeling the painful burden of guilt for attempting to scrape together some glimpses of hope to convince ourselves that life was worth living when it became a daily internal debate. No one will ever know the joy that I experienced when I saw that beautiful racoon on my walk, nor will they be able to understand my bafflement running into my former schoolmate at work, but everyone can relate to the depression and dread that I experienced this year not knowing if I would ever be able to make it through it.

And that makes my memories of 2020 feel a little bit less lonely.