When my parents reminisce over moments long, long ago, they always mention how they feel it had happened just the day before. I’d always assumed that was a hyperbole. But now, I think back to one of the final days of 10th grade, and it truly feels like yesterday.
My playlists are time capsules. Each one, chronologically sorted, takes me back to a specific moment in my life. Every song brings a flood of emotions and memories—an almost indescribable feeling of nostalgia mixed with deja vu. When I miss a person, place, or time of my life, all I have to do is find that one corresponding playlist and press play.
My best childhood memories are a patchwork of my time spent in Otis Wood Lands, a small community exploding with my family’s history. Over forty years ago, my grandfather and his brother each bought small cabins in Otis, a tiny town in rural Massachusetts.
In the modern, superficial, forever-online world that always wants to sell you something, nostalgic tech is a rare breed: it is offline, it is permanent, and it is plain. Nostalgic devices are not simply reliable machines or shiny baubles in the consumer rat race.
Every single day we create new memories. And in doing so, we subconsciously intertwine specific experiences with our surroundings.
Last August, exactly two years after my parents moved to Texas, my boyfriend, Jack, held my hand while I wept outside of my childhood home and wiped snot on my sleeve. I grew up in a small colonial house on a sleepy suburban street in Maryland. A huge oak tree blanketed the front yard in…
