living in longing

mentally, i'm in the past — entry 08

a few weeks ago, i watched my sister pack her bags to head back to the city. the company she works for has instructed its employees to return to the office after six months of remote work. now, i’m left alone in our family home with my parents, and there’s no need to brew coffee for two people anymore.

with restrictions loosening and places reopening, things are slowly coming back to how it once was. at least for some. with every tap on people’s instagram stories, i see friends grabbing drinks together and couples having restaurant dates again. i watch through these photos and videos from my bed with lingering fear and profound unease.

there is something incredibly strange about this stage of quarantine we’re in, where people seem to be living in two different realities. in one, people have gotten their old lives back. the sun is shining, and the worst days are over; they’re driving to a nearby holiday town, and dining in dearly missed unlimited korean restaurants. in the other, people are looking out from their windows, still too anxious to step out. mildly paranoid about what can potentially happen if they do and in complete disbelief how other people can do it.

i’m no longer interested in arguing which of the two is the ethical choice. however, i find it impossible to feel joy and excitement about things coming back to normal when we know full well that the pandemic still rages on.

i’m watching everything unfold from the inside. we’re seven months in, and i still haven’t gone anywhere farther than the grocery store that’s two kilometers away from home. my refusal to go outside makes me feel like i’m actively choosing to waste even more time as if i’m purposely leaving myself out from the rest of the world.

some days i feel insane for still feeling nervous. am i mad for still refusing to go outside? most of the time, though, i feel too disoriented from the present time to even think about it.

instead, i spend all my time thinking about the old days. as everyone scramble to find any amount of joy wherever they can—whether indoors or outdoors—i always find mine in the past.

escaping through remembering

one of the first things i do in the morning is reach for my phone, not to browse the news or read new messages, but to check my instagram archive and find out where i was a year ago.

this time last year was one of the best weeks of my life. i finally watched carly rae jepsen in the flesh after years of listening to her entire discography. after the show, my friends and i went straight to our favorite bar, got drinks, talked, and danced until the wee hours of the morning. a couple of days after that, it was halloween. my girlfriend and i dressed as daphne and velma from scooby-doo, and together with our friends, we went to three or more bars in one night. i don’t remember the details, but we capped off the night by grabbing fries in a nearby diner.

so much has changed since. no more live shows and no more dancing in sweaty, crowded places. i can’t remember the last time i drank alcohol. that favorite bar is permanently closed now. and so as the three bars we visited on the night of halloween.

this year is full of inconsolable losses and great misfortunes, and the only way i can find comfort is clinging to warm memories of the past. soaking myself in these “good old days” has become my most effective escape from hard times.

sometimes, i think, it’s the primary reason why i write so much. from meandering journal entries to sentimental personal essays, maybe all this is just a way to make sure that i’d be able to relive good memories when i need to.

even things from recent history that i used to detest, such as my daily commute to work and long lines in a restaurant, i now look back on fondly with newfound appreciation.

baudillard by boot boys biz, from dazed digital

these waves of nostalgia also prompted me to reach out to people from my past. in one particularly wistful moment, i messaged an old friend from high school, someone i hadn’t properly talked to in years but undeniably played a huge part in my adolescence. the conversation didn’t flow as naturally as it used to when we were kids. i don’t know why i expected it to. it was a struggle to keep the dialogue going; all we could talk about was the pandemic and our nation's state. we didn’t have anything in common anymore, other than the countless catastrophes we’re all experiencing. thinking about it now, maybe we were never similar even before—just the school we studied in and the people we were with.

in on earth we’re briefly gorgeous, ocean vuong wrote: “i miss you more than i remember you,” and that’s exactly how it felt.

i’ve been thinking about an episode of how i met your mother that i recently re-watched where robin discussed the concept of graduation goggles. she explained it as the perspective shift we experience right when something’s about to end, like how you suddenly feel wistful for a job you just walked out from even though you absolutely hated it or how you remember the few good times of a miserable relationship right before you end it.

this made sense to me. maybe, i thought, what i’m wearing now is a pair of pandemic goggles, and it’s a rose-tinted one. i’m revisiting the old times and old friends, remembering them in a more favorable light because i know that our present and future will never be the same or even anything close to it.

the world has changed—fully and in every sense of the word. and i want to keep remembering the simplicity and safety of the past, no matter how inaccurate these memories may be.

all i’ve been doing lately is missing. missing the past and how life used to be, missing the present and imagining what could’ve been. it’s homesickness for a world that doesn’t exist anymore and a world i unknowingly romanticized because of its absence.

on the night she moved back to the city, i asked my sister what it looks like now. she said it looks normal and there are already a regular amount of people outside. the next day, my mother, probably worried about how i haven’t gone out for months, invited me to go to the mall. i refused, i told her i’m scared and that the face shield makes me dizzy.

she told me i have to live with it and get used to it. it’s the new normal, she said as a matter-of-factly.

in the early days of quarantine, novelist arundhati roy wrote about how the pandemic is a portal. she wrote: “historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. this one is no different. it is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. we can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks, and dead ideas, our dead rivers, and smoky skies behind us. or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. and ready to fight for it,”

the thing is, though, it’s a gateway i’m not ready to cross just yet.

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