I’ve never thought of myself as a particularly nostalgic person, but it’s the reason why I save so many Snapchat videos and why the thought of potentially losing old text conversations made me hesitant about upgrading to the iPhone X. There are few things that make me feel all the feels like listening to songs that were particularly meaningful to me at distinct points of my life and looking through old photos.
Hearing Hotel California will always take me back to my competitive dancing days and late nights cooling down after dancing rounds in a room full of sweaty competitors. (That meant sacrificing a Friday night to dance your heart out and do burpees, wall sits, mountain climbers, and planks.) Ignition will always be a summer night dancing at a local bar with my best friends and some drunken strangers twirling us and spilling their drinks all over as we belted out the whole song.
I’ll always remember one of my most perfect days in Italy. I was backpacking with Kristina, and we had one last day in Sorrento. We started the day not knowing what to do, but we ended up spending the afternoon lounging on a pier over the most clear turquoise water. That’s where I met my Italian lover (I wish), Paulo. He could barely speak English, but he asked us to walk around and explore with him. He wanted to spend the next day with us, but we were flying to Croatia–that’s when I realized I had just missed out on my Lizzy McGuire dream. But even though I didn’t get my dreamy Italian pop star boyfriend, Kristina and I had the quintessential Italian dinner out on the patio of the most popular restaurant in the city square, did some shots of limoncello, and ended the night with gelato. Sometimes I find myself feeling homesick for memories like that.
In the midst of this Salt Lake winter inversion, I often think back to happy summer days. It’s not any one event in particular, but more the overall feeling of my life at that time. It was afternoons by the pool and evening walks with my best friend. It was days filled with friends and rodeos and road trips and fairs. It was the daily conversations and sappy texts from a guy I really liked. That time of my life was so much… lighter. I was so trusting in the way things would work out, and worries were few and far between. I know I’ll never experience life like that again, but part of me just thinks if only.
And sometimes that longing feeling hits you when you’re right in the middle of it all. You realize that you’ve reached some pinnacle of happiness, and you can only do your best to soak it in because you know you can’t hold onto it forever. It’s a weird thing to mourn a passing memory, even as you live it.
A couple of months back, I took a trip to Orlando that ended up being one of the best trips of my life. Each day was so unbelievably fun and full of moments where everything seemed to work out perfectly. I just kept asking myself, “How is this my life?!” I was with my most travel-compatible friends, and we got to go to Disney World for free and didn’t ever wait more than 20 minutes for a ride. We danced several nights away in downtown Orlando, went to Hollywood Horror Nights, attended a soccer game, and never went to bed before 3 a.m. We were simply happy everywhere we went and through everything we did. (Even when I temporarily lost my Disney gate pass and when we nearly missed our flight home.)
In the week following my trip, I was in a funk. I physically ached to go back, and I fell into a weird state that felt a lot like a mild depression. I don’t know about you, but I seem to get that way after the really great experiences in my life. Following the tour with my ballroom team in the U.K., I was left with a huge void. And that time it wasn’t because I was coming home from vacation–I was staying in Europe for several more weeks! It was how much I love the friends I had been with and knowing we would never get that opportunity back or be all together again. Even though on tour we slept in some shady places, spent a lot of time on the bus, and suffered through some less-than-ideal activities, we always found a way to make the most of it. I couldn’t explain it, but I was in Paris and feeling sad over the fact that we had all gone our separate ways and they were doing things like going to Seven Peaks and having game nights without me. Irrational, I know.
This time since I actually had to go back to work and real life, I spent my time editing the photos from our trip and putting together a couple of highlight videos to relive the memories. I must’ve watched them 200 times in that week. But in the middle of that funk, I just thought to myself how lucky I am to have those people in my life. To have those kinds of opportunities. To be young and really living.
That was two months ago. Life went on, and I settled back into my everyday routine. But now for some reason or another (or rather one guy and another), I’ve found myself reminiscing about all those experiences that have impacted the person I am today and given me perspective. Even though yes, those moments are gone, that’s the beauty of life. We’re always collecting new experiences and memories–good and bad–that change us.
So for now I’ll look through old photos, watch my videos, and remind myself of how much I’ve grown. (Finally planning my next two trips helps too.) And even though I’ll never go back to those particular moments, there will be so many more to come.
