Nostalgia

Writing from the zip code I was born in, I feel comfortable admitting that because I don’t think I’ll be here for long. It’s served its purpose.

Cherry blossoms, New Haven, CT.

I left, of course, a long time ago. But I came back, as we sometimes do, looking for something (cheaper rent, real pizza).

Right now, I’m looking at the metal and glass of new construction reflect the sunlight back onto an 18th century church across the street. If I didn’t know the sun moved so quickly, I’d worry about the focused beams of light from the rivets lighting that roof on fire. But I sip coffee and think about how the stone church is still standing hundreds of years later and no one ever thought about corporate real estate development and glass facades when they built it back then.

You can never go back.

Not once you leave. When you leave, a place changes without you. You change too. Nostalgia comes from greek — nostos and algos — the pain of returning home.

It’s not the pain of leaving or the pain of being away. It’s the pain of missing a place that does not exist anymore, and that you will never return to because you’re separated from it in time not in space. So could we ever start fresh in a place we’ve already been?

I left my childhood home at 15. I didn’t want to live there and I had conned my way into a prep school with a full scholarship so my parents had to let me leave. Since then, I’ve moved 22 times. I won’t tell you how old I am, that’s part of the fun, but I’m sure I’ve moved quite a bit more than what is explainable to the average normie in the duration since high school.

During my senior year, the guy whose name was on the building of the pool i swam in every day wrote me a recommendation letter to Yale, and absolutely zero people could understand why I made a different choice (to get as far away as I could from New Haven, CT at the time). Anyway, I’ve just come off living in an apartment for 3 years which was the longest place I’ve ever lived since I left the first time. Part of it was the pandemic, but part of it was nostalgia and wishing it could work. Now, I am planning to move away again this year. For good.

Maybe I don’t know what home feels like. But I know I am standing within a few hundred yards of where the first americans in my family lived when they got here about 100 years ago. After the wasps, after the academics, they were the labor that built this city. The food here is different from anywhere else (or it was), and you can still hear language from that older world — distorted by time and distance into its own living thing. But every day I hear it less, fewer signs, fewer whispers in the parks. With it recedes my connection to them here.

My great grandmother’s name comes from a word for an ancient tree. When I looked her up, I found that she lived here as an alien, staying an italian citizen until her death. When my grandmother Norma Rienzo died, I thought about how the cell that eventually became my first existed in her body. That cell was created on earth just before my mother was born, a root in time since 1954, decades before I would be born here in the zip code I stand today.

But everything is built fast now. By people who don’t live here and agnostic to their history. Everyone I’ve come from has gone. And since I can’t go back in time, maybe it’s just time to reset the roots to land they recognize.

Anyway. Rinasce più gloriosa…

My favorite 100 year old tree…