I feel so retro this weekend.
Though my life has changed radically in the last year, this weekend has felt like it belongs to years past. Remembering is different now, though. There is less nostalgia. While I still remember it fondly, there's a distinct feeling of being glad it's over, living happily in the present and looking toward the future, without longing at all for the past. I'm grateful for its being and even more grateful for its passing.
I left my shiny new laptop's charger at home, leaving me to edit my short stories on my old faithful desktop computer, the computer that carried me through late middle school and high school. It contains my teenage years in folders of pictures and writing, a digital scrapbook of me. The computer's painfully slow speed gives me time to contemplate each file I open before proceeding to the next, thinking of where my head was at when that photo was taken or that piece written. Sometimes, I don't recognize the person I see at all. This does not scare me like it might have before.
My computer's files prompted me to scan through the inscriptions in my high school yearbooks. The people who wrote in them hardly exist to me anymore. The laughter behind the inside jokes has faded in a way the pink gel pen never will. I remember how I felt slightly queasy about a particular inscription, with it's overly sentimental message and promises, and feel even more queasy about how untrue its become. That's all I wanted when it was written, but now I wish it didn't have to be that way. I expected to feel this way five or six or ten years after graduating high school, not in a year. But now I can safely say with supreme confidence that high school is not the best years of your life.
Sitting on the couch, eating my favorite frozen pizza and watching sporting events with my parents reminds me of the evenings after school I spent in that very position. At one point, I pulled out my homework assignment from UNC and it felt so alien, like an artifact from the past carried home in a time machine. I looked at my bookbag with suspicion before stuffing the assignment back in.
Sitting here at this desk in my my messy room, waiting on Dad to finish grilling hamburgers on the deck, typing away on my desktop computer, it feels like I should get up tomorrow morning and drive to the community college, park the car, and step into the T-building lobby. I feel that same way each time I swing my car Bessie out into the road in the direction of town, just as I did each morning for several years. Though I have a shiny, new car, I still feel at home in Bessie's driver's seat; it's safe, I'm in control, it's comfortable. But I'm not overly sad about it like I suspected I would be. I want to drive the new car, with it's new car smell and updated interior. It is change, and I like it.
But the time I feel most like my past self is when I'm reading at night before bed, forgetting the time and the rest of the world until I turn over the novel's last page. Books, though always new ones, are the one constant thread throughout my twenty years, and they faithfully evoke the same comforting feeling time and time again. Whether I'm reading them in my bedroom at home by my halogen octopus lamp, or reading them perched high in my lofted dorm bed, I feel peacefully present. I know as long as I can access that feeling, I'll never be lost.
Though I must rejoin the actual present tomorrow night, I'm happy I've had this weekend of reminders to show me where I've come from, to remind me of where I have to go.
