Nostalgia is a Girl’s Best Friend
nostalgia, your grip on me is unbearable. you hold my face with those too-warm, too-familiar hands and drag me back into moments I thought I’d outgrown. you press your fingers against my cheeks and suddenly I’m tasting strawberry yogurt again—the cheap kind that stained the spoon pink—and you make it feel like it meant something. like it was happiness. like it was enough. you kiss my forehead with the smell of old shampoo and sun-warmed skin, and for a second I believe you’re giving me comfort. but then you rip me backward, violently, into days that have dissolved, and I’m left gasping on memories I can’t live in anymore.
nostalgia, you treat my life like an open wound. you bruise my present by rubbing the past into it. you parade my Velcro shoes in front of me as if they were proof of a time when life fit easily, when fastening my own sneakers was the most triumphant part of my morning. you remind me of the Disney princess towel I wrapped around myself after every bath, the one that made me think I was worth a storybook ending. but all you’re really doing is showing me the outlines of moments I didn’t realize I was losing while I was living them.
I’m tired, nostalgia. tired of carrying the weight of small things that didn’t hurt back then but shatter me now. tired of waking up with the scent of the cheap strawberry shampoo I used at seven clinging to my memory like humidity. tired of reliving those cartoon shows I watched before school—the ones with theme songs I can still hum even though I can’t remember what I ate yesterday. tired of feeling my chest tighten because you bring me back to the sidewalk lined with roses from my old neighborhood, the ones I used to trail my fingers along as if they were soft enough to belong to me.
you make me miss people who aren’t dead but feel gone. you make me miss a version of myself who wore mismatched socks and didn’t care, who thought the biggest tragedy of the day was a scraped knee or running out of fruit snacks. you make me ache for nights when I fell asleep with wet hair on that princess towel, when the glow of the cartoon channel kept me company because everything else in the world felt harmless.
nostalgia, why do you do this to me? why do you come with tenderness only to carve me open with it? last night, you placed a single image into my hands—me sitting on the curb with a melting cup of strawberry yogurt, swinging my Velcro shoes, watching ants crawl across the concrete. nothing extraordinary. nothing cinematic. and yet I woke up hollow, as if losing that moment was losing an entire life I didn’t appreciate enough while I still had it.
you make me feel like I failed my own childhood simply by growing up.
nostalgia, look at me.
look at what you’ve made me: someone who grieves over cartoon theme songs, someone who mourns the smell of a shampoo that doesn’t exist anymore, someone who aches for the roses across the sidewalk because they were the first beautiful thing I ever touched without fear. I’ve become someone who cries over memories that were never meant to be held this tightly.
Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedyou won’t release me. I know that.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedand maybe that’s what hurts most—Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedthat you keep feeding me sweetness I can remember but never taste,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publisheddays I can see but never step back into,Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publisheda life I lived only once and didn’t know was slipping away.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishednostalgia, you suffocate me with softness.Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedand still—Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when publishedstill I can’t let you go.
my last piece of work was about the confusion of being a person. how people misread you even when they care about you, and how you misread yourself too. it was me trying to make sense of the fact that we’re all changing so fast that there’s no “final version” to ever hold onto. i wanted it to feel like a reminder that not knowing yourself isn’t something to be ashamed of — it’s just life. ⋆·˚ ༘ *
✧ from last week’s writing
Judy Moreau
I’m trying to build a small space on the internet where things feel sincere and human. if you’d like to be a part of it, there’s a subscribe button below. ♡
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( thejudymoreau@gmail.com )
♥︎ writing this made me realize how much the smallest memories still own pieces of me. it’s strange how something so tiny can hurt years later.
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