It’s a funny thing, returning to your old haunts. Ever since I ill-advisedly visited my primary school’s Christmas fair 6 months after leaving, strutting around in a crisp-shouldered navy blazer (at that point lacking the gentle mantle of wear and grime it would acquire over the next 5 years and therefore marking me out as a massive year 7 to anyone with eyes in the immediate vicinity), I have always been given to nostalgia. I am a confirmed reflecter, ponderer, diary writer, even if I can’t read my 16-year-old self’s entries without wanting to turn myself inside out and then crawl into the nearest hole. I like to keep receipts from good meals and ticket stubs from days out; to rifle through old photo albums from years before I was born, with far more interest than even the subjects of the photos themselves. Don’t get me wrong, I can move on, I do move on, but things and places stick with me, especially if it’s something I associate with an intense emotional experience, one I won’t get to relive. Backstage at the Wythenshawe Forum where our dance school put on shows; the muggy darkness, frantic whispers and muffled laughter, the itch of tulle, the cloud of sweat, nerves and hairspray that would hit you like a wall when you stepped inside the stage door. My grandparents’ living room, framed photos of us on the mantelpiece, electric fire glowing, the soft dark green leather of the settee. A photo of my uni room in third year, small, spare, standard-issue basic but a treasured place of my own and sanctuary from stress.
I recently got back from a 10 day trip to Jordan with my good friend Anna. I studied Arabic at uni and met Anna through our daily, 2 hour Arabic classes (they do say trauma bonds you!). We had to go on our year abroad in the second year, where we spent 9 months living and studying Arabic in Amman. We had a lovely flat and a truly brilliant time there, and ever since we left in the summer of 2019, we have always talked about going back – in the spring, when it’s warm but not too hot, when lush green grass and delicate yellow flowers spring up dense and improbable on every spare scrap of land and roadside, with no homework or exams looming over us, when we had (a little) more money. We rented a flat for the week, the top floor of an apartment building with its own shaded terrace, a little piece of heaven crowded with potted geraniums and aloe vera, boasting 360 views of Weibdeh and sufficient space for me to roll out my mat and do some yoga on the sunwarmed tiles, or just sit and read, journal, bash Duolingo (Anna’s activity of choice), refreshed by the breeze, listening to the call to prayer float up from the minarets and echo between the hills.
It might sound like a bit of an ‘exotic’, unusual holiday, but in fact there wasn’t much, if anything, that we did while we were there that we hadn’t already done when we lived there 4 years previously. We wandered happily around all our old haunts – Rainbow Street, the Citadel, downtown, second circle – and kept to a schedule, deliberated on at length, organised with almost military precision, embarked upon with dogged determination, unperturbed by its being Ramadan, that meant that we could visit all of our most favourite restaurants, one by one. It would do us a disservice (I write as I draw myself up to my fullest height in indignation) to call it a trip down memory lane, solely serving the purposes of nostalgia; we simply had a great time there before and wanted the same again. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t checking there was enough space in my diary before we left, preparing to have a good old reminisce, reflect, slip back into memories of my life 4 years before, how much I’d changed since then, swim in that warm, bitter sea of feelings again.
I know I’m not special and that lots of people do this; go back to their old house, school, uni, the town where they grew up. You may, as I did, selfishly imagine that these places will be just as you left them, unaltered by the years, waiting, the stage set for you to have a movie-like, full orchestra-soundtracked epiphany about the meaning of life, the trajectory your life’s taking, whether you were right to end that relationship, whether you should keep dying your hair or go back to your natural colour. To my surprise, however, the first few days of our trip went by, and that moment didn’t appear to be coming. We had a great time going around all our favourite places, getting reacquainted with the culture and warming up our Arabic by having the same conversation with every taxi driver: yes a little, we’re from the UK, we used to live here, the French institute. From the first day I felt at home, like I had hardly been away at all; stepping back into an old pair of shoes you haven’t worn for years but still fit perfectly, that muscle memory of routine and familiarity, a street you’ve walked so many times before that your body knows where you are even while your brain is still adjusting. It didn’t really hit home, where we were and what we were doing, until we went back to my old school. Anna went to a different school which we’d visited already, but she very kindly indulged me by letting me drag her along to mine.
At sunset one day we took a taxi to third circle then walked the short distance down the hill to the park neighbouring my old school. We sat on the bench under the willow tree where I’d sat so many times before and watched the sand-coloured tower blocks on the opposite flank of the hill turn pink reflecting the sunset, the clouds moving overhead, the whoosh of the cars hurrying by on their way to iftar. I didn’t actually go inside and look around – I'd learned from the Christmas fair fiasco and didn’t want to look like a loser – but it was enough to sit in the little park beside it and look. I went to the edge of the park and looked at the little white building and its leafy courtyard below, at the patio of the house next door where the gaggle of stray cats I used to feed would play, but went no closer so I wouldn’t be seen. I closed my eyes and played through a film reel of memories, all the hours I’d spent there, the friendships made, how confident I became in Arabic and how proud I was, how much I’d agonised over my relationship, how much I missed home. Remembered bundling myself in a taxi at the end of the day on a Thursday, rushing across the busy city in the dark back to our flat. Remembered making that journey on foot on my twentieth birthday. Nearly 4 years on, I sat there immersed in nostalgia for a few minutes, and left feeling both glad we’d gone and glad to be leaving, having internally thanked, honoured and exorcised a great but poignant time in my life that I'll never live again.
Ever since, I’ve been wondering why these thoughts and feelings didn’t come to the surface before then, at any of the many other favourite places we visited, and I think I can put my finger on it now. Those feelings of nostalgia and sentimentality come on strongest at those places that I can’t really visit again, at least not in any meaningful way other than stand outside looking at it; school, university, a job, your old house. That's the odd thing about moving on from a place that differs from moving on from people; a lot of the time, you’re leaving somewhere that you won’t be able to visit again. My parents live about half a mile from my high school but I’ll never walk its halls again; I could visit my favourite café in Oxford and wouldn’t get too emotional (unless it’s over the freshly made waffles and ice cream, in which case, fair play) but walking along Pembroke Street looking up at the third floor window of my first year bedroom, a site that holds so many visceral memories for me that I’ll never see the inside of again felt like someone walking over my own grave. I don't think it's really about the place, but rather the intense experience of the life you lived there, and can’t – will never be able to – recreate anew. You can’t step in the same river twice, and so on. So as I become an adult and leave my childhood behind, I have a complicated relationship to these places where we spend so much of our lives, but once left, we are effectively barred from. I’m not saying I think this is wrong, however. We've all known someone who can’t move on, can’t accept that time has passed – the older kids that hang around the school gates years after leaving, the person who visits their old job expecting to be welcomed like a prodigal son – and we (reasonably I think) tend to treat these people with suspicion. No-one wants to be that person. Given as I am to nostalgia, I want to have a healthy relationship with it, and I think sometimes we do just have to accept when something is over, as hard as it can be.
While we were in Jordan, I wanted to go and see our old flat again, too, but in the end, we didn’t get time. The last days of the trip were reserved for excursions outside of the capital, so between tidying up our flat and navigating the general nightmare that was driving around Amman in a rental car that we had to return spotless on pain of death/extortionate fees, we didn’t get time to go. I did feel a pang, driving past our old neighbourhood and out of Amman, leaving it behind and knowing I probably wouldn’t see it again. But I didn’t fight it too hard, as, if I’m being honest, I felt silly trying to come up with reasons why we should go in the first place. It was out of our way, a fraught drive over to the other side of town, and for what? To stand on a quiet residential street and spend five minutes looking up at an ordinary apartment building, reminisce, sigh, then get back in the car? And still, I really did want those 5 minutes. I can’t even turn to my stash of diaries for insight into what my life was like there either because it happened to fall smack bang in the middle of what I now call my Christian Era, meaning that what I actually wrote amounted to a prayer journal, filled with pleas to God for a boyfriend who wouldn’t forget that I existed every 3-5 business days, and so have little record of what I was actually up to day-to-day, although thinking about it, maybe those prayers are equally revealing of the place I was in at the time. If I had got to visit the flat again, who knows what kind of epiphany I would have had gazing up at the covered balcony with its tinted windows, the water tanks peeping down from the roof. Quite possibly, none. But I’d seen moments like this so often in films, where endings are always so romanticised, each moment brimming with emotion – the character gazing movingly at what they’re leaving behind before walking away into the sunset as the music swells – I think I was hoping for such a moment of my own.
The comedian and filmmaker Bo Burnham talked about this during the press tour for his 2018 film debut Eighth Grade: how so many significant life events and experiences – first kisses, first loves, graduation, weddings, funerals – have been so faithfully and mawkishly depicted in film and TV so often that when they arrive in our real lives, we find ourselves waiting for the film plot to play out rather than experiencing the moment as it naturally unfolds, and often finding that it has been crushed by the weight of expectation. I remember when my prom (in itself an American movie importation that felt incongruous with Stockport Town Hall) went off without a hitch – no drama, no catfight, no tearful dancefloor confession of love – it felt a little anticlimactic. I don't know whether I want to get married but I have still internally remarked on more than occasion that if my future partner doesn’t burst into tears when they see me in my dress like they do in all the rom-coms and wedding videos I’ve seen, they hate me, it’s over, I'm turning heel and walking out. Even if it’s something I might not end up wanting for myself, I’ve ‘seen’ it happen that many times that I still have ideas about how it’s supposed to go.
It’s hard to say whether the same applies to death since I have little experience of it, but since starting this piece, my family and I have had to have our most beloved cat of 13 years put down, and conversations on accepting life’s endings have taken on a new significance. Norman was not well, struggling to breathe, wheezing from a tumour in his nose, sneezing blood, and we loved him so very much that we would rather let him go than keep him alive, but in discomfort, just for our benefit. When it came to it, it happened so quickly and easily like he was falling asleep, like everyone says; saying our goodbyes, a last kiss to the top of his head, then standing there watching with hot tears on my face, dizzy with the awareness that he was slipping away, a raft drifting out from the shore onto a mist-shrouded, endless ocean; knowing that it was happening and being powerless to do anything gave me so much sudden vertigo I thought I might be sick. My brother remarked afterwards that there was so little fuss, he was so good-natured and trusting until the very end, and he was right. I don’t think we or he could have wished for a better way to go, but still the shock of it all stayed with me for days.
In the aftermath, true to my nature as a sentimental nostalgic, I wanted to go through old pictures of Norman, both in order to reminisce on the 13 years we’d had with him and also to find some pictures appropriate to my ‘announcement’ post on Facebook. I’d posted so many pictures of Norman on there when we first got him that I felt I couldn’t not post a picture marking the end of his life as well. The search term ‘cat’ on my iCloud photos brings up 2,839 results, and it will be the same for the rest of my family; Norman had many different expressions and attitudes (all very similar but different enough to be worth photographing) so I would be surprised if he wasn’t the most photographed cat in human history. There were a lot of photos to go through, not only on my phone but on my old laptop as well, the almost 10-year-old behemoth weighing about as much as a slab of concrete onto which I used to upload all my photos and organise them into albums manually before eventually admitting defeat and letting ‘the man’/Big Brother win i.e. switching over to iCloud; the laptop that today is reserved exclusively for the purposes of running Sims 2, sparing my actually functioning laptop and heating up so much in the process that it could serve as a makeshift frying pan.
Have you ever done something like this? Would you want to go through a perfectly preserved time capsule of your 14-year-old self’s life and outlook? I wouldn’t recommend it. Like going through your teenage self’s diary – though arguably worse because there is damning visual evidence as well as descriptive – it was unnerving. Once I opened up the file and started flicking through, this whole other life, whole other person that I had forgotten about was suddenly leaping out at me almost unbidden through the screen; not just hundreds of selfies, countless photos of family, friends and of course, Norman, but the screenshots of texts, makeup ‘tutorials’, outfits, the meals I made (‘healthy’ ingredients thrown together in dubious combinations; I did not know how to cook), equally dubious inspirational fitness quotes, celebrities I fancied (most notably Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera). I know why I saved it all, I think – for posterity, so this time in my life wouldn’t be forgotten. But having spent an hour looking through it all, I’m starting to think that there is some luxury in forgetting. I have often heard it said by people older than myself that they are glad smart phones weren’t around when they were young for this very reason – recording for posterity the awkward developmental years when you are still trying things out, and inevitably getting them wrong. I haven’t completely escaped this, although I’m happy to be joining the ranks of old fogies by chiming in that at least, in my most awkward years, Instagram served no more a purpose than a place to post your new trainers, a Starbucks frappe, you and your friends at Cineworld as opposed to what it’s come to be notorious for, i.e., the place where everyone you know and yourself included is a constantly busy, travelling, socialising, immaculately dressed, uncanny-valley photogenic hologram. But smartphones have still meant that my teenage life was faithfully documented, in sometimes painful detail, by me, and after just an hour of looking at this eerily crystallised, cryogenically-frozen 14 year old Greta, I felt like I’d put my brain in a blender. Much as I feel affection and compassion for my younger self, it was like I had let this other creature out of her box, summoned this old ghost, and once out, it took a while for me to shake her off again and snap out of it.
The whole experience sent me under for the rest of the day, and talking to my parents about it I felt almost jealous of them that evidence of their teenage years was confined to a few photo albums rather than caught in 4k like mine – and that’s coming from someone who at the ancient age of 23 can still remember having alotted “computer time” of no more than 30 minutes a day on my dad’s tower desktop before it was switched off and the analogue world prevailed once again. I can only imagine what it will be like for today’s teenagers to whom smart phones and social media have presumably become as second nature as breathing. What, too, of the millenials who have grown up and have children of their own? There are the parents who blur their toddler’s face in every Facebook photo, and then there are family vloggers who have built brands and make their living posting videos of their family life and their young children for thousands of anonymous strangers to watch, children too young to even understand what is happening to them, much less consent to it – who knows what the repercussions of that will be.
But putting that extreme aside – presuming your parents haven’t converted your baby videos to digital format and shared them with the world – would it be better, then, given all this embarrassment, to have never kept a diary, to let the old pictures disappear into the ether? Record nothing, remember nothing, jettison your past, leave no trace? I don’t think so. As I find with most things in life, extremes in either direction aren’t helpful, and for me, nostalgia can be a treat that I indulge in when I feel like it. But going forward I'm going to ration it, a little at a time when I'm feeling robust enough, and most importantly, be armed with the knowledge that I might not like what I find.
