As my final year of secondary school comes to a close, I’ve been revisiting my camera roll from the past four years. Because our school required us to have iPads, my friends and I have documented a lot of our experiences—school trips, restaurants, parks, birthdays, etc. I decided to make my friends a slide show of all the pictures I'd taken, and to score it to the song “Time Adventure,” from my favourite tv show, Adventure Time. As I edited the slideshow, I was overcome with intense nostalgia for all the happy memories that I'd shared. Making the slideshow took hours, so I listened to the lyrics, “Will happen, happening, happened,/And we’ll happen again and again,/ ‘Cause you and I will always be back then,” until late into the night, revisiting all these experiences as if I was living them for the first time. Because it's difficult during these times of isolation to make new memories, it's easier to look behind than ahead. Nostalgia is a complicated emotion to describe; that mix of fondness and sadness, with underlying tones of regret, has often crept up on me. But I don't think I've felt it as intensely as I did that midnight at the beginning of June.
You enter the National Park of Nostalgia through a lake in which you can breathe perfectly. Your first view of the park is from below, through the distorted surface of the lake. The park can be visited in any season—sometimes it is covered in snow, sometimes in wildflowers. Everything is smaller in the park, and warped, as if you were looking at something stuck in a snow globe. You may choose to wander the small paths that go on and on, or you can visit the caves that are only ever as big as a bedroom. It is always twilight in the park, and it is always body temperature, even if you visit in the middle of winter. It is neither easy nor hard to leave this park—in fact it seems like it slowly fades away before your eyes.
Arwen, Age 17
Montreal, QC
This story is a selection from National Parks of Emotion, an evolving participatory art project documenting people’s emotional experience during the Covid-19 pandemic. Writing edited by David Goldstein, photos edited by Mindy Stricke.