Nostalgia

Where do I begin?

Nostalgia has always been a big part of my life. At least, I thought it was.

It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started noticing something changing. People, places, and even the smallest things that once brought me a warmth I couldn’t quite explain were slowly losing that familiar feeling.

And I missed it.

I missed feeling nostalgic.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve spent a lot of time lost in thought, often thinking about the past. Sometimes all it took was a certain kind of weather, an old neighborhood, a park, or remembering someone I hadn’t seen in years. Suddenly, I would feel this overwhelming sense of happiness. It was almost as though the world had come alive again.

But somewhere along the way, I started questioning those memories.

Was I romanticizing the past? Was I remembering only the beautiful moments and forgetting the difficult ones? Maybe I was choosing certain memories because they made me feel safe. Or perhaps that’s simply what we do as humans. We hold on to what felt good, even when the experience itself was far more complicated.

A few weeks ago, I ran into an old classmate from middle school and high school. Of all places, it happened in the vegetable section at Walmart.

He recognized me immediately.

“Ana Pano!”

I looked at him and said his name right back. Marcel.

We laughed, caught up briefly, and then he said something that stayed with me.

“Seeing you makes me nostalgic.”

I started laughing again. Partly because it was such an unexpected thing to say while standing in the vegetable section at Walmart, but mostly because of the coincidence.

For weeks, I had been thinking about that very feeling.

I had been wondering why I didn’t experience nostalgia the way I once did. I used to revisit certain places and feel something almost impossible to describe. An old park, a familiar city, even the air on a particular afternoon could transport me somewhere else.

The world felt awake.

Now, sometimes I return to those same places, hoping to find that feeling again, only to discover that something has changed.

Maybe the places have changed. Maybe I have.

Or maybe I’m searching for a feeling that belonged to a version of myself I can no longer return to.

Still, there are certain memories that haven’t lost their warmth.

One of them takes me back to Mexico.

Sometime in the mid-to-late 1990s, when I was still a little girl, my mom and I traveled from the United States to visit family in southern Veracruz and Chiapas. We were undocumented in the U.S. at the time, and I remember riding an old train through villages surrounded by endless greenery.

More than anything, I remember the humidity.

It was so hot. The air felt thick, and everything was green. Coming from Fresno, California, it felt like entering another world entirely.

I remember looking out from the train as we passed small villages and landscapes that seemed to go on forever.

There was something about that greenery that made me feel alive. It felt expansive, almost limitless. A world so different from the one I knew back home.

To this day, tropical greenery brings that feeling back.

A few weeks ago, I returned to Chiapas with my mom.

As we drove away from the airport in Tuxtla Gutiérrez, I found myself looking out the window at the landscape. The green hills, the vegetation, the familiar feeling of warm air.

And there it was again.

That feeling.

But this time, something else made the experience especially meaningful.

We’d been back to Mexico many times, including just last December. But this trip felt different. For the first time since I was a little girl, it was just my mom and me traveling together. As we drove through Chiapas, I thought about that old train ride and how much our lives had changed since then. We were traveling with our documents now, but what stayed with me most was the feeling of being there together, just the two of us.

We were on our way to reconnect with family and celebrate my uncle’s 86th birthday. I was looking forward to seeing relatives, hearing marimba music, and being surrounded by the sounds and traditions that have always felt so familiar.

I couldn’t help thinking about the little girl I once was, looking out from that train decades earlier.

And there I was, sitting beside my mom again.

So much had changed, yet something about that moment felt exactly the same.

I think that’s what makes nostalgia such a beautiful and complicated human experience.

Sometimes it brings us back to people and places we love. Other times, it reminds us of things we can never quite experience the same way again.

As I get older, I find myself worrying that certain memories are slowly slipping away. Not necessarily the events themselves, but the feelings attached to them.

I remember what happened. I remember where I was. But sometimes I struggle to remember exactly how it felt to be there.

And I wonder why.

Maybe life has become so fast. There is always something to do, somewhere to be, something that needs my attention. I don’t spend as much time getting lost in my thoughts as I once did.

Or maybe I’m simply growing older and learning that our relationships with people, places, and even our own memories are constantly changing.

I don’t really have an answer.

I just know that I still miss that feeling sometimes.

And when it returns, even for a moment, I want to remember it.