Nomadic Nostalgia: Daydreams from the in-between

An attempt to define the pain of the split.

nos·tal·gia

noun: nostalgia; plural noun: nostalgias

a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations.

The term 'nostalgia' is derived from the Greek words nostos (return) and algos (pain). The literal meaning of nostalgia is suffering evoked by the desire to return to one's place of origin.

I moved back to Vancouver almost one year ago. Dropping into my seat in that airplane in Managua, I felt pretty confident in my decision. Clutching friends’ thoughtful gifts of physical photos, books and jewelry, it felt bittersweet to leave behind a community that filled my life with so much joy and peace for three years. One that helped me to find my way home.

A resilience for water shortages and muddy motorcycle rides added range to my character, my hometown friends told me.

But I felt ready for a return to my old home. To reconnect with my supportive (and patient) friends and family. Some of whom had started to graciously accept a reality wherein I lived a surfer life for the majority of the year, for the rest of time. In all honesty, I also had considered this possibility.

Since leaving in July, I’ve felt happy with my decision. And then I walk through a conversation in Spanish between a couple on the seawall. Or catch three seconds of a particular song drifting through a car window that passes me. It’s the scent of something that unexpectedly pulls me out of my daze in a store and tosses me into a core memory. A visceral moment of the past. This is what causes the aching for it back.

Is it still called deja vu if you can recall the exact memory?

Yesterday, it hit me hard, surprising me in the form of a feeling that resembled something like grief. Tears welled up in my eyes and I realized how terribly I missed it. My morning routine in the jungle. Surf before work. Sundays with the girls. Carlos’ Grandma in her white plastic chair, eager for a chat about absolutely anything I could find the words in Spanish for. Rushing to surf in a different way than the way I rush to pilates (sorry, eucalyptus-smelling fancy gym).

When I moved four years ago, I hadn’t relished in a hobby sweet enough for daydreams since high school. When I left, I took home a love for the ocean that outweighed most romances of my twenties (sorry, boys).

This feeling sometimes hurts as much as the way it feels to miss someone you once loved. That desperate ache backed by a force strong enough to convince you to do almost anything, if only for a taste of that old life back.

I wanted it back. Sometimes, I really want it back.

One of my best friends, still in the tropics, sent me her thoughts in a voice note today in response to my homesickness: From evolution comes grief. Grief is a feeling that is caused by the evolution of life, simply put.

The more we evolve, the more we have to grieve. If we’re lucky, life as we know to be will slip through our fingers. It’s an unfair paradox of growing older and wiser, I suppose.

It’s like losing a house we know so well. Romancing each of its tiny ceiling cracks and creaky floor boards in our memories. The ones that served as the familiar path from our bedroom to the kitchen for coffee each morning as we grew up within those walls.

But how lucky to be able to revisit that life when we need it most? A life that exists, just a plane ride away? It’s a version of deja vu we can still try on for size.

Lucky, unless of course, we never really feel whole in one place as a result. Will we, the people who build homes in more than one place feel forever torn between the cracked walls and creaky floorboards of those places until the end of time? Dreaming of one home while laying in bed with the other, forever homesick.