Nostalgia is suffocating me. There is something in the air so familiar, so warm, it knows me so well that it can just wrap tightly around my body and tell me not to go. With two months left until graduation, I feel as though I am fighting to not let each day that passes at SLU be a part of that nostalgia.
Many people see nostalgia as bittersweet, but I have been seeing it as cruel. I may sound like I am whining, but I miss being at events and not wondering if it is the last time I will be there or hanging out with friends and wondering if our relationships will be the same after graduation. I want to be able to be present and not feel like I have grown out of this stage of my life.
But I cannot, and I have become exhausted from grieving something that is still breathing.
Yet, here I am whining again over the hope that these moments are not my last. The thought that I may be able to find a way to make college live on longer. Because if I do not, it is as if everything I have built for myself will be tied to this place and will dissolve once I leave.
So maybe that is what makes nostalgia so cruel and suffocating. It convinces you that growth can only exist in the place where it happened. Once you leave, the feelings expire, the friendships weaken and the confidence fades. You will never feel this perfect combination of hope, terror and maturity again.
So I let nostalgia wrap around me and fill my lungs.
I romanticize the stress, the exhaustion and the insignificant problems. The gullible hope that my future will pan out the way I dreamed. But the more time I spend in life with rose-colored glasses on, the less I am actually living it. While I am so busy anticipating the ache of missing it all, I am thinning out the joy still available to me.
Nostalgia is not just a collection of memories; it is fear disguised as endearment. Fear that I will not find something this safe again. Fear that I will not recognize myself in the next chapter, or worse, look back at myself now with regret.
The amount of mixed emotions makes me feel sick, and has me wanting to put my rose-colored glasses back on again, but that would rid me of the truth. Or the proof.
Proof that something mattered enough to hurt when it changes. Proof that these years were not passive, but every time I loved deeply, laughed loudly and failed honestly, was deeply ingrained into the person I became. And maybe that is the feeling I have been misinterpreting this entire time. By treating the relationships and memories I have built as a scar rather than as something that can be part of me if I allow it.
Nostalgia has only become suffocating because I keep letting it be trapped inside me. But you are not meant to hold air. The more I try to preserve this version of my life, the more I compress it, making it something to choke on.
These years mattered, and I will not let my growth expire once I cross the stage. I will carry the lessons, the friendships, the failures and the love as evidence that I am capable of moving on with my life. And maybe that is the real feeling of nostalgia. Not bittersweet or cruel, but a reminder that those memories were worth creating and that you are strong enough to keep building, even after you leave.
So I will no longer let myself suffocate. I will let nostalgia do its work as I continue on these next two months and the rest of my life.