In this month of February, in the heart of a winter that I find a little bland, I felt overcome by nostalgia. I must admit that even though I am joyful, festive and forward-looking by nature, nostalgia is a feeling that I have been around for a long time.
But before going any further, allow me to provide here a definition of nostalgia, the one found in the Dictionary of the French Academy, which I find particularly accurate and well-written: “Regret felt at the thought of what is no longer or that we no longer possess, at the memory of an environment to which we have ceased to belong, of a kind of life that we have stopped leading, of a bygone era, etc. »
For as long as I can remember, this nostalgia has always been part of my life. The idea that time passes and things change is a feeling that takes hold of me even in a completely absurd way sometimes, or at least in a slightly superficial way.
So, as a teenager, having experienced almost nothing myself, I was nostalgic for a time I had not known. I dreamed of drinking a milkshake in a dinner American. I imagined myself joining my friends there after school in a setting where the pastel colors of the walls and Formica tables blended perfectly with the chrome stainless steel of the counter and stools. We would have chosen the latest fashionable hits on the jukebox and, on Saturday evening, we would have gone to see movies in a convertible at the drive-in theater. This desire to live my adolescence in the 1950s instead of the 1990s came mainly from the cultural objects that I consumed. I was reading ArchieI listened to covers of Happy Days and even Marty McFly, the hero of an iconic film of my time, traveled back in time to the 1950s.
As I entered adulthood, a little before the Y2K bug, I began to miss my old man. walkman. It must be said that portable CD players were particularly inefficient. Impossible to listen to a piece of music while walking without it skipping. As such, the arrival of MP3 players will have enabled a wonderful revolution. Except that it wasn’t the object that I was missing, it was everything that came around.
I missed the carefree adolescence when, lying on my stomach on my bed, I moved my cassette backwards with a pen to save the batteries. I listened to my favorite song over and over while cutting out pictures from a magazine to stick them in my diary. Becoming an adult meant the end of this candid idleness, the end of an era where I had neither taxation nor parental responsibility, much less the notion of my own purpose. Maybe it was more a feeling of dizziness than real nostalgia.
As she moved into the world of real adults, becoming a mother of three children and an artist with a thousand jobs to make ends meet, nostalgia began to come in small waves. Lack of time, probably. I found myself thinking about my childhood, of course. Especially since I grew up in another country. I miss its smells like its landscapes and sometimes come to my memory, but it is furtive. I barely crack a tender smile when I see myself running clumsily on a pebble beach in Normandy. Nothing more.
Most of the time, I was disappointed by the actions I took out of pure nostalgia. Drinking a blue raspberry slushie doesn’t taste at all the same as it did when you were eight. At 36, it tastes like disappointment and hypoglycemia.
The nostalgia I feel today is completely different, deeper, more overwhelming. It appeared when I was browsing the Internet last week when I saw the announcement of the closure of the Rio boutique, an emblematic clothing and shoe store on rue Saint-Denis. It was the place where young people came to expertly create their marginal look. Since the age of 15, this is the store where I bought my Doc Martens shoes.
With its closure, it’s as if I have just lost another point of reference on the timeline of my existence. I felt the same thing at the time of the painful closure of the Spectrum, a performance hall where I spent such memorable evenings. And then there was the first Thursday when the newspaper See was not published. I mechanically looked for it at the local café, where the display would remain empty from now on. I have to admit, many places and objects that accompanied me for almost four decades no longer exist today.
I’m not one of the people who thinks that everything was better before, but today, I have empathy for my mother who still says “Berri-De Montigny” or “la Régie” when talking about the SAQ. I don’t refuse to age and I believe that today’s world has as many faults and qualities as the one before, it is just a little different. However, it will be more and more difficult for me to make a pilgrimage to the heart of my youth, because things simply disappear. The older I get, the more closed stores, obsolete objects, outdated songs and transformed neighborhoods there will be. I will have to get used to it and above all be at peace with these changes if I want to embrace the world as it moves forward and the youth who are building it.
And if I let nostalgia overwhelm me for a few more moments, I know that it will be like high tides, this wave will swell, then leave again. I will be able to look towards the horizon again.