When I crave nostalgia, I look at Keith Haring's works.
I went to the cardiologist every four years as a child. I was born with a minor heart murmur that was monitored up until I was twelve.
The children's hospital had a Keith Haring statue on the lawn. Three figures stacked atop one another - blue, then yellow, then red. Instantly recognizable, quintessentially Haring. I remember smiling every time it rose over the horizon as my mom's car approached. Seeing that statue every four years wove Keith Haring's art into the fabric of my childhood. I can't remember a time when I didn't know his works.
The EKG technicians made me feel like a princess. Not for tiaras or royalty or pretty dresses, but because they always asked me about the book I was reading.
"I'm reading Fairy Realm! It's about a girl named Jessie who enters a world full of fairies and sprites through a secret gateway in her grandmother's garden, and she works with the magical creatures to get back her grandmother's charm bracelet and save the Fairy Realm."
"I'm reading Superfudge! They're making cookies out of worms."
Instead of feeling vague and unknowable, I felt understood. I felt like someone people wanted to know. I felt like me.
So I loved going to the cardiologist. Seeing Keith Haring's statue overwhelm my backseat windows as we neared the hospital, I knew I was close to feeling myself.
Sometimes I think that the older I've gotten, the more detached I've grown from myself. It seems that with each passing year, I become more people-pleasing, more agreeable, more affable, more pleasant. In most interactions I feel like barely a whisper of myself. A thread hanging off a sweater that you could gently tug off and then discard, let it float away into the wind. It's derived from me, but it isn't me. It's mostly who I think people want me to be.
So I crave nostalgia for my childhood. It's an odd thing to crave, when you think about it. To yearn for yearning. It's an ouroboros of longing.
I long to be back in the time when I was esoteric. I wasn't weird because I was trying to be different. I wasn't weird with an over-consciousness of my quirks. I just was. I was me, diving into worlds of fairies and olive brine and bad haircuts on a rainy day and the crock pot wasn't turned on.
So I look up Keith Haring. His more colorful and commercial pieces. His transgressive black-and-whites. And his statue, standing out in front of my children's hospital.
It starts off sweet. A gentle swelling in my heart. A lilting rise of warmth in my chest.
Then, sickly sweet. Saccharine.
It bitters.
Then it beckons at my tear ducts. A gentle wave passing over my eyes like a moon tide. Not enough to break onto the shore, but just enough to paint a wistful dew on the windows.
I yearn to feel the freedom I felt as a child. I didn't know how good I had it back then, and I wish I could go back, not remembering being there but actually being there, and think to my eight year old self, "I'm happy."
That feeling becomes so much more illusive with age.
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