He was not very nostalgic. He didn't put a great deal of weight into the past or the future. Mostly he existed in the present or near-present.
That weekend, he had gone to his childhood home to help his parents with the final preparations for their retirement move to Florida. He helped with their garage sale and got two final desert bike rides in with his dad. On Tuesday, the movers came and took everything out of the house. As he walked around his empty childhood house for the last time, he didn't feel sad. Until he walked into his emptied childhood room. No furniture, no boxes, just emptiness. Despite that emptiness, or maybe because of it, he felt the weight of his life in that room.
As he walked around this space this final time, the creak of the floorboard was magnified by the sensory deprivation of a naked room. Gone were his bunkbed-turned-twin-beds. Gone were all his baggy '90s clothes and marching band saxophone and files of notes passed to high school friends. And yet this solitary scene reincarnated memories.
He was transported back to the moment he moved in as an awkward and hopeful 12-year-old. A nerdy Midwesterner trying to make it in suburban Las Vegas.
The night he came home crying after the neighborhood boys made fun of how he rollerbladed.
The first nervous time he invited a group of friends over to play Mario 64.
Hours of practicing that pesky saxophone, which he now realized couldn't have been fun for anyone in the house.
The very late nights talking on the phone to his freshman year crush, who never became anything more than a friend.
His alarm clock playing his favorite Dave Matthews CD at 6am for the last time as he went to his final day of high school.
Staying up late with friends and trying to be quiet, the squeaky floorboard his nemesis and tattler. It would betray efforts at stealth and shenanigans.
This room was empty, but not emotionally vacant as these remembered feelings washed over him.
Was this nostalgia?
It had been a well-worn room, with shadows and outlines of the past. The carpet with furniture imprints or holes in the walls from posters.
Gone was the residual goo from his attempt to Velcro an industrial sprinkler, a treasure from one of the many construction site visits with his dad, to the ceiling.
Filled was the dent in the wall from when he threw his cordless phone across the room in a pique of anger. The still-fuzzy memory revolved around frustration over losing his Wet 'n Wild season pass in 8th grade.
These halos of his history had already been erased as part of his parents' two-year efforts at updating the house for sale with new carpeting and a paint job. Looking around, he saw that this was no longer exactly his room.
Even in his parents' diligent attempts to perfect everything, there were still small imperfections and hints at its past. He saw the still-broken outlet behind the desk that would invariably frustrate him when he was anxiously attempting to plug in a new gadget. Just like the one spot in the new sod that his parents' dog was able to pee on and kill as the house was about to go up for sale, despite their militant efforts to prevent such an outcome.
What memories were patched over and lost?
He imagined all the overwrought emotions of his teenage era floating in the room and landing on the walls. The most powerful ones seeping into the drywall and the studs like mold spores. This patina of his humanity safely embedding itself inside the walls. Maybe to be subtly felt by some future teenager.
Here he was, in this empty house, inhabiting this space for the final time. He faced the reality that keeping these chapters of his story vibrant would now require other modes of remembering. His underperforming memory, photos, and stories.
What is nostalgia, really?
He was about to step out of his room for the final time, but paused to turn back for one last lap. As he walked, he stepped on that pesky and persistent floorboard. It gave a final creak. Maybe for the first time, he appreciated it.
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