Nostalgia That Never Lets Go

Cover image: provided by author

Do you ever get that sudden feeling of remembering a mundane moment that happened in the past during your sleep? If you do, then you’re probably like me… a lot.

Whenever I try to go to bed, there’s always something that gets in the way of me falling into a deep sleep. You know where this is going (or not)… the nostalgia from (mostly) my middle school days. You’re probably thinking, “Why the hell are you still remembering middle school? You’re in high school now, you should focus on that and your future!” 

Well, the majority of materials that I used during this time (assignments, notebooks, etc.) are still in my room; they prevent me from ever forgetting. Twice Amino screenshots (I don’t use it anymore so please don’t ask me for a link to my profile), old Instagram messages, photos, and even an end-of-year book from seventh grade are also part of the mix. Sometimes it’s a good thing, other times, not so much.

Back in the first half of seventh grade, I liked someone on Amino. I used to share my wall replies to that person with one of my best friends. That went on for about two months - I stopped sharing the screenshots in December. Then, in January/February of 2018, I started the process of getting over him once and for all. I took a screenshot of my profile’s bio stating, “this isn’t valentine’s day,” basically proclaiming that it was done. During mid-February, I started to like someone else - someone who I actually knew in real life. Somehow, I still remember the first couple of messages in my DM with him on Instagram. All of the stuff that I would share with him about “Zombies”, I remember. This is the beginning of the nostalgia that followed.

One example of a nostalgic offline item that I still have with me to this day is the book my ELA class made at the end of the year, titled The Values Within Us. I still read the narratives that my close friends wrote in that book. It was about what they learned from past or recent experiences. Admittedly, after two years, I still miss that class because a lot of them were also part of it (if you were in Gryffindor during the 2017-18 school year, you know what’s up).

Seventh grade is over and it’s time to start the final year of middle school. This is where mostly the offline nostalgia happens. One prime example of this is my math notebook. Since I was sitting next to my best guy friends for the entire school year, you know things would sometimes be chaotic good. One of them wrote “[Name] was here” and I wouldn’t know until I came home from school. The other one, well… I had written conversations with when I didn’t want to speak. Sometimes it was funny, other times it was serious.

And yes, onto the yearbooks and photos. I guess the most nostalgic part of the yearbooks are the photos I took for it (during the 2018-19 school year), since I was enrolled in the class in 8th grade (yep, you’re reading something from a middle school yerd). A year prior to that, I was constantly taking pictures via the Huji app since that was what everyone was using at the time to make everything look aesthetic. You could even pay 99 cents just to import old photos and “hujify” them. Unfortunately, I can’t directly access the photos I took in 2018 on the app because they’re on my old phone. However, there’s always AirDrop and Instagram post archives.

From reading all of this, you can already tell that even though I didn’t have the best experience in middle school, it’s a time of my life I’ll never forget.