Performed at Fourteen East Live 2026, "Nosalgia".
My mother thought that I would never grow hair. I imagine it didn’t start to properly grow until the priest dunked my head into a pool of blessed holy water. I was a blank canvas, free of original sin.
As a little girl, I remember standing in a coffee shop in the Gare Du Nord waiting for my parents’ coffee as they sat outside. The French barista thought I was adorable. He gave me a free cookie and I twirled in my little denim dress with a frilly lace Peter Pan collar. I ran with the cookie back to my parents, forgetting their coffee with a big smile on my face. As excited as I was, I remember thinking that I only got the cookie because I was a kid and that when I grew up, I would have to do a lot more than be a cute little girl.
I could always feel time course through my veins like an IV drip. I stared up at the bag labeled “CHILDHOOD” as it taunted me, followed me everywhere, drip … drip … one day. Another day. Another day after that. Drip … drip … there goes your high school graduation. I could feel the needle tug on my arm when I rolled it through the McDonald’s Play Place and told the girl I was playing with that I was sad we would never see each other again. I felt it tug when my mom would navigate around Picadilly Circus and the West End, and all I could think of was that I would have to think more about my surroundings than I already did one day.
I had traveled all over Europe by the time I was eleven. I saw more plays and musicals than I saw movies at the cinema. My best friends lived in the same cul-de-sac as me. Whenever I was lonely, I could run outside and be greeted by my friends whose parents seemed to do nothing but stay home all day. I could escape into fantasy worlds into my books during school breaks while my parents had to work. I could have time to do all of those things. Of course I didn’t want to grow up. Of course, I was met with the tantalizing dread that the safety net would rip, and I would plunge into God knows where. Everything was so perfect, so safe, I savored every moment like it was a fleeting memory. A memory where only perfection could exist, and the rest of my life would never be a life of hardship and imperfection like the adults who worked tirelessly in mini cubicles, even through the summertime — like that man who gave me a cookie at noon on a weekday.
Eventually, the “CHILDHOOD” bag ran out as the clock struck midnight, and I had to pull the needle out from my arm myself as no one wanted to get close enough to me. I had to wear bras when my uncles came over. My boy best friend across the street stopped talking to me because overnight I became a girl, and talking to girls was against the rules now. I watched my dad become just another man instead of a person that I could depend on. I watched my mom turn into Ophelia. As I watched her, I became scared of drowning in the rose petals from boys’ bouquets on prom night. Running, something that used to be a fun pastime in the fresh-cut grass, turned into a means to an end that you do while trapped on a human hamster wheel to lose weight.
Not even hitting adulthood yet, I became trapped in a body of sin that I did not commit, a body that would be suited better in museums. I became a prisoner, a pariah, for simply existing in a body I did not choose to exist in. I was laughed at for crying, mocked for my pain. I was touched and stared at by men I thought I could look up to. The safety net had broken. I slipped through the cracks and became trapped underground, unable to enjoy Sixteen Candles ever again. All I could do was look up and beg people to look at what I was looking at too, but they never would.
From thirteen onward, time started to move like a river, where the water slipped through my fingers and all I was capable of doing with it was staring at my reflection. The sound of running water drowned out the noise of the concerts I should be enjoying, the awards I was winning, the life I should want to be living. I blew out birthday candles on a cake I refused to eat and opened presents I didn’t care about receiving. All I could feel was nothing. And I was awful and ungrateful for feeling nothing. Maybe ungratefulness was my sin. At sixteen, my family and I were looking at photos of a beach trip we took when I was thirteen. As my mom and my aunts marveled at the white sand and simpler times, all I felt when those photos were taken was distress at how big my thighs looked in my swimsuit at sixteen compared to then — of course now, at twenty-one, I look at photos when I was sixteen and think, “What was I on?”
Reading turned into something I forced myself to do just to stop thinking. I obsessively clung to my old photo albums so hard that the plastic began to yellow from my fingertips. All it did was make time feel less real. I could feel all of the suffering that my ancestors went through at the hands of my other ancestors. The dichotomy split my head into holding onto hope that things may get better someday and wanting to rip people’s hearts out. I closed my eyes and dozed off under the hot shower every night, trying to scrub my body clean of the sins that everybody but me could see, but none of it worked as the hot water only made my hair tangled and brittle.
I thought of the coffee shop. Maybe if I smiled, wore clothes I loved, stopped caring about how I had no thigh gaps, ate dessert, figured out how to do my hair, started to shave and pretended like nothing was ever wrong … I could be born again.
It worked for a little while. I started to have friends again as people stopped viewing me as Wednesday Addams, the girl who sat in a corner blasting My Chemical Romance and read The Bell Jar. I was suddenly invited to parties and people thought I was hot and not weirdly offputting. I had finally learned to not be so ungrateful and bottle everything up. It even got me a prom date.
I didn’t romanticize having a boyfriend, but I did romanticize being seen. I poured my heart out, told him everything I had ever felt about anything. Lesson learned — never entrust your deepest darkest secrets to a sixteen-year-old boy who jokes about beating you while he plays Mortal Kombat with his best friend who thinks racial slurs are funny. We didn’t even last until that same prom.
Growing up in all of my rejection of being the heartbroken damsel, the martyred housewife, I began to come to the realization that I had wasted my childhood romanticizing masculinity. Don’t cry, don’t feel anything, you don’t want to be a girl. The right woman will support you and see you for all your flaws, even if you don’t spell them out for her. I wanted to be loved like how women loved men, without conditions or standards to live up to. But if men were socialized that way, what all-knowing female entities were going to support him? Surely she couldn’t show emotion either, otherwise he’d never have the woman of his dreams.
So women are told — don’t be the nagging wife, be the cool girl. Your husband is a man. He doesn’t know how to comfort you, you have to comfort him. Why did he cheat on you? You must have done something wrong. Be a good wife. Sit. Stay. Roll over. Spread your legs when you’re told, who cares if you’re tired? Men are allowed to externalize their rage and inflict pain onto others as emotional relief, women have to suck it up and deal with it. And trust me, I dealt with it. I’m still dealing with it, I struggle to breathe from biting my tongue all the time. I spent so long being afraid of drowning below the flowers above the creek, that I never realized I was neck deep.
The newborn, hairless baby, the little girl that ran through the Pont des Arts across the Seine having the world in the palm of her hand, the sharp-tongued young woman who wasn’t afraid to call people out, has become a distant memory. In her place lies a woman with dirt under her fingernails and a tongue that has been bitten so many times it might fall off. A woman, trying her best to claw herself out of her vengeful ancestors’ graves in a world that wants to put her back in it.
My humiliation ritual of an ex gave me a major tolerance boost to the sedation of nostalgia. I’ve reveled in it before — I rewatched Gilmore Girls more times than I could count just to giggle when Jess and Rory got together. “505” was my top song for three years straight, just so I could relive being on Tumblr during Alex Turner and Alexa Chung’s relationship. I watched my Almost Famous DVD so much I knew the exact moments it skipped.
I try to not hyperfixate on the times the DVD skipped, otherwise I start to relive lying helpless in the creek with water inside my lungs. When I listen to songs that remind me of the past, I now skip them. I freeze in terror and turn my headphones up when I smell certain things in public that take me back to the ice cream shop I used to work in, where I met him. I can’t feel that way again.
Maybe DVDs skip because we’re not supposed to relive old memories. Because if we did that all the time, we’d end up in a madhouse. Nostalgia is a sedative, a temporary high. I’ll smile at the little girl who got a free cookie in the Gare du Nord, but at the same time, I’ll embrace the memories of forgetting my backpack on the Eurostar and losing my dad’s books, just so I don’t go crazy wishing to be six years old all the time. I’m scared for the day I forget how awful high school was and smile at my old birthday photos. I don’t want to ever bask in the thought of being sixteen again. If that happens one day, please check to see if I’m in the Cook County sanitorium.
Header Image by Gia Clarke
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