Nostalgia Sequence: My disappointment at having accidentally grown up

I was in the kitchen at 11pm, washing plates and spraying surfaces and putting things away, while my parents were upstairs in bed. On the radio they were talking about how people used to think nostalgia was a pathological homesickness, a disease. That it could be a killer, and that the only cure was to go home. 

At first I couldn’t work out what I was feeling, as I stood elbow deep in bubbles, listening to Radio 4 and scrubbing the dishes I’d used to cook our tea. It might be nostalgia, I considered. Except this was my home, technically, at least for the next few months. So it couldn’t be that.

As I stood in front of the kitchen sink, gazing aimlessly, vainly at my reflection in the window, I remembered then that even though I was only 23 years old, and it was only 11pm, that I was really tired; I hadn’t been sleeping well lately. And also that my parents had come down to visit me in my house that was only my home temporarily, and that I had offered to make tea for us, and was now cleaning up afterwards. 

I’d insisted on it, truly, but I was only now realising, as I found myself alone again in the kitchen, on autopilot as I switched off the kettle at the wall, knowing I’d be the first to switch it back on in the morning, that sometimes living for other people was exhausting. 

I’d even rejected my mum’s repeated offers of help shouted through from the living room. 

No mum, honestly, I’m good; she didn’t know where anything was in this kitchen. 

This must be a bit like what it’s like to have kids, I thought to myself as I left the wine glasses to drain on the side board, and quietly closed the kitchen door behind me. Then, when I was tiptoeing round my own bedroom with my phone torch, trying to find my pyjamas in the darkness while my parents dozed peacefully in my bed, I realised this must be part of why people bother to have them. That eventually, after spending our childhoods longing to grow up, that all we want when we’re older is for someone to look after us when we’re tired. 

 

After I’d brushed my teeth, and spent too long studying my eye bags in the bathroom mirror, greyed by lack of sleep and the fluctuating feasibility of paying my too high rent on time each month, I traipsed back downstairs to the sofa, to curl up with a rogue pillow and one of the blankets draped across the back. I could hear my mum’s snoring from down here, but for once I didn’t mind; it was nice to have her home, and it reminded me of being in the one I'd grown up in. 

As I settled in for a willingly uncomfortable night’s sleep, I found myself pining for the days when to fall asleep on the sofa meant waking up in your own bed, with no recollection of how you got there.

I scrolled through my phone’s alarms, to make sure I got myself up on time for work tomorrow, and thought about how I hadn’t appreciated enough, being little and having no work to go to. Then I thought about melancholic soldiers dying because of missing a home they couldn’t return to, and eventually I realised what that feeling was. 

I wasn’t nostalgic for a home that was no longer there, or that I could no longer go back to. I was desperately disappointed at having grown out of a childhood like dependence I could never experience again, and into an adulthood it had been almost too easy to accidentally slip into.