Things I’m Nostalgic For

Things I’m Nostalgic For

Being able to go outside and ride a bike or take a hike outdoors safely. Just — leaving. No phone. No check-in. No location shared with anyone. The specific freedom of being unreachable and nobody panicking about it or me being in fear.

Not having to access anything through an app by default.

No social media sites.

No dating websites.

Old streetlights and old headlights.

Not carrying a cell phone anywhere because they didn’t exist yet.

Landlines. The particular intimacy of a stretchy phone cord you could wrap around your finger while you talked for two hours about nothing.

Dial-up. Even the beeping. Especially the beeping. The sound of the internet trying very hard to send data.

Pagers. Pagers were genuinely cool.

CD players and mp3 players.

CD Cases full of CDs organized in alphabetical order by artist.

The printer paper with the frills on the sides. You know exactly what I mean. There were many childish and creative uses for those frills and none of them were the intended purpose.

The old style of texting where you have to click abc, def, ghi, jkl, mno over and over and had to somehow type paragraphs in 30 seconds or less.

Television sets with vhs players attached.

Typewriters.

Real whicker furniture, namely peacock chairs.

Cartoon Saturday mornings with cinnamon toast crunch.

Genuine family style food portions.

Shocktarts.

Dunkaroos.

Green gobstoppers. Just the green ones.

Passing notes in class folded into tiny squares and triangles.

Gel pens.

Butterfly clips.

Stretch chokers. The braided looking ones.

Baggy jeans and platform sneakers.

Skinny jeans and ballet flats. No they are not cheugy… The word cheugy is cheugy…

I will not be taking questions.