Nostalgia: the drug you never knew you took
Remembering a time when everything felt full of promise
Sunlight flashes through the trees. It has been a hot day, a surprise after an insipid summer. Full beeches and oaks barely rustle above me as the road winds ahead. Autumn is conspiring in the wings: he will claim these leaves soon, his fresh, cool fingertips turning them to yellow, to red, to brown.
For now, I drive the fine seam between the two seasons, a dance of gold and green. The empty road straightens out as sunbeams pour through the branches, spangling the tarmac. They tinge the air with warm, honeyed memories and unexpectedly, on my drive home, I am there again.
Twelve years ago this week, I went to university. It was hours away in Exeter, a city whose name kept edging closer on the road signs, the miles descending like a countdown to the future. In a car laden with unnecessary belongings (two spice racks, a halogen oven?), we drove into this strange town, my new home. University buildings stood on a distant hill like the Oz of my academic life. Everything was leading to this. My stomach knotted in a way I have never felt since.
This was it, then. Small fish, enormous pond. With a clean-shaven face I introduced myself to my neighbours along the corridor: a girl from Northern Ireland, a girl from London who insisted she was really from Northern Ireland because her parents were from there, a sleepy-eyed guy from Wales, a guy who barely spoke to me because he fancied the girl from Northern Ireland and thought I did, too. Other faces from the building eventually came and joined this new, ragtag clan, thrown together by circumstance. Friendships were attempted with cheap vodka and just the right amount of personal, usually sexual, information to endear yourself to one another, sometimes lying just to make yourself more interesting. The things you think are normal at eighteen.
Though I did not know it at the time, those feeble bonds would dissolve once term began. Of course they would. They all found new, like-minded friends on their course. I did, too, I suppose, but they were more acquaintances at that stage. In truth, the first half of my time at university was just dull. Evenings and weekends were solitary, quiet. I lived alone and would entertain myself by walking for miles and hours – an unhealthy amount, probably — learning almost every corner of Exeter, every riverbend, every pavement that wound through neighbourhoods most other students never needed to go to. I would book train tickets home for half-term and collect them two weeks in advance from the machine inside the station merely for something to do. Sometimes, depressingly, the only person I would speak to in person was someone behind the till of a corner shop. After all those hours walking, I had at least earnt a Lion bar and a ‘hello’.
As miserable as it was at times, I had to stick at it. I wanted to. The more I stayed there, the more I could feel there was something forming, like molten glass slowly hardening as it cools. Months rolled by, the days growing longer, one year giving over to the next. Suddenly I had been there for two years.
My third year was spent teaching English in France, being given ridiculous amounts of free money through EU-backed schemes. It was a time that transformed me, as though someone had finally prized away the eggshell I was trying to crawl out of. My eyes opened, my horizons broadened. By the time I went back to university for the final year, the world was in technicolour: I was walking those same streets and seeing the same faces through an entirely new lens. I was a new person, stretching his arms into the world with a whole company of friends just a Facebook message away.
University was no longer something I was simply moving through, but a wildly detailed carpet that I was actively, clumsily unrolling. It was lectures, seminars, tutorials, revision, essays, exams and beans on toast, yes, but all the other things that make a person. Still now I could take you there and show you where house parties went on, where quasi-philosophical conversations were had in the early hours of the morning, where I received my final exam results. I could show you the beds where I experienced horrible, truly existential hangovers and the beds where other things happened. I could show you all the coffee shops I haunted, at whose sticky counters I developed a taste for that most formative of drinks.
Like a homesick ghost I could show you around the campus as if I were still there, pointing out this and that. And perhaps it would be on a late autumn afternoon, too, where I once stood at the top of campus and saw the afternoon spill over the hills with beams of blinding golden light, red leaves everywhere. A moment when everything felt utterly, enticingly full of promise.
I have brooded on that time more than usual this year. As much as I want to blame the wistful, sepia tones of the incoming season — that rich, autumn light — it is more than this. When the present is unstable, does not go as planned, the past feels more alluring. So alluring that you do imaginary deals with yourself: okay, okay, I will give up all my knowledge of the world so I can be back there again, twenty-two, with another shot, lost in the inconsequence of everything. The past is so alluring that sometimes I want to know nothing about who I am and have to find it out all over again, guided by the indie songs I never listened to at the time but now find myself almost romantically attached to. So alluring that sometimes I sit, thinking, remembering, my eyes turning misty with memories, feeling the mists turn slowly into tears.
Surely it is human to hanker for what is familiar? It gives us purchase in a fast-moving world. Through the proverbial rose-tinted glasses age thrusts into our hands, everything in the past can look better — or, at the very least, ‘not so bad’. Even the long, silent weekends with not a soul to talk to. This is the cruelty of memories: they are always illusions, inventions of our unreliable mind. Even the bad things can diminish with time, tricking you into a belief that the past was always better.
I try to remember that it is not really university I miss. I do not long to be debating renewable energy in a German oral class again, or renting a terraced house blighted by nocturnal slugs. Those moments came and went. But there is something I miss about the past, about university: all the invisible things, the mere oxygen of it. The strange mix of naïveté and ambition of your early twenties. That knotted stomach. I miss the feeling that life was only just beginning.
These days, on the rare occasion I cross paths with a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old, I find myself swimming in an emotion I think is a benign kind of jealousy, one that only comes with experience. An envy of all that flexible, malleable, unspent potential. Though I might roll my eyes at their dependence on TikTok, the little prisoner in my head is silently screaming, banging on the walls to have another walk in their shoes.
‘Oh, to be back there again…’
‘You have so much to look forward to…’
‘Enjoy it, make the most of it…’
… I say, at grave risk of sounding like an Older Person.
They call this nostalgia. Of all the substances your may or may not put into your body at university, nostalgia is one you never know you take. It is an intoxicating thing that never leaves you; no kidney or liver metabolises it. It lives in your system forever, doing nothing most of the time, and then unexpectedly, years later, triggered by a Galantis song or a handful of scattered sunbeams on a country road, it floods your veins like boiling sugar and suddenly you are back there again, thrown through your windscreen, headfirst into the past.
Great piece, Connor. “When the present is unstable, does not go as planned, the past feels more alluring” captures the pull of nostalgia well.