no(t)stalgia

[~glitch me daddy eight to the bit\]

 

Opening a box that’s been shipped to you from the other side of another country and finding it full of objects from your childhood–

Objects that made up your immediate world as far back as forty years ago and were part of your day-to-day for years, that you haven't seen for years. And now they are with you again far outside of their initial context.

How do you express the meaning of these things when meanings were never defined in words because these objects were with you before you had full grasp of language?

Are things only really valuable if you can condemn them to be recreated inside a mesh of language?

Then, even then, neither the language nor the things gain much value because they are mine. And what am I? What authority backs my words to give them weight and validation that would convince anyone else agree to give them greater value?

Nostalgia has been a hot word these days, but I do not long for my past. Nostalgia is not a word I would use to describe what I feel when I reconnect with my past. Unless the practically nauseating, full body shudders I get is nostalgia?

The feeling is more like the spookies I get when I visit haunted places. I guess that means I haunt myself. I conjure up the ghosts of my past selves. And I have to face their disappointment. I have to explain to them how I continue to be trapped in a (mental) health hole. And why the world isn’t any better. 

Try explaining to a child why birth capable people in Puerto Rico and Greenland desperately needed to be sterilized for the good of humanity without their knowledge or consent, but known human predators aren't lobotomized right away. It's cheaper and quicker the transcranial magnetic stimulation, but we suddenly have 'the ethics' to consider for these people– for some reason. 😒 

(I hope those two islands unite in their shared sorrow and make something powerful of it.)

Among the self-haunted toys, books, and things, I found a bag made by one of my sisters when she was learning to sew as a preteen or teen.

The bag was full of my plastic jewelry from the 80s: pop/snap beads and bright plastic charms that clip onto bright plastic chains that were too itchy to wear.

There was also a rainbow heart necklace that I wore for a grade school class picture.

[steal my look.]

Looping that piece of the past around my neck now, I feel it strangling me in ways I did not feel when I was little.

How do humans call themselves advanced as thinking animals when it’s sociopolitical daring for me to wear some bright vintage children's jewelry? What good is all this impressive human cognitive powers of logic and emotional intelligence if ya let yourselves get narrowed in the think-works so bad that heart symbols and rainbow colors manage to engender such... fear? Fear of being impinged upon by an "other."

Not only are my past selves disappointed in humanity for being this asinine, but probably the ancestors too. Not just my people. All of them.

You want to put people on Mars, in an environment entirely hostile to the species, but you can't figure out something like fair public bathroom usage in Florida? Really? 

Can you hear all the booing from the beyond yet? 

No? Well, I'm booing. And not in the spooky way either.