Two clicks and "there’s no place like home," and suddenly I’m five again, wandering the halls of the Atlanta house my parents bought when my dad went corporate and my mom did her best Martha Stewart impression.
Two blinks and I’m eight, nose buried in a book about fairies, convinced that if I plant a garden in the backyard, they’ll come flurry around me. I still believe in magic. The boy next door is my biggest crush, and I fall asleep on the car ride home after dinner, still small enough to be carried upstairs. Let’s be honest, at 5’1, that last part is still true (depending on who’s doing the carrying).
All of this to say, it really is the small stuff that sticks. The big moments — graduations, moves, heartbreaks — are the ones we highlight in conversation, but the in-between is where the feelings are. The smell of a childhood bedroom, the way the sunlight hit the carpet at just the right angle, the exact thump of my mother’s footsteps coming down the stairs — those are the things I miss the most, the things I couldn’t have known were slipping away while they were happening.
That eight-year-old girl is still here somewhere. She still believes in fairies, still hopes to be one, still tries on sarcasm like it’s her mother’s high heels on a playdate. But so is the fifteen-year-old girl…the one who finally had her first kiss and really didn’t like it (sorry, Jonathan, neither of us knew what we were doing). She had a Blackberry and a guitar and a travel schedule that looked great on paper but felt isolating in real time. She rebelliously declared to her mother that she wanted to do "nothing" when she grew up, but what she meant was that she wanted more time be fifteen, more time to dream, more time for friends, more time.
And what she really dreamed of being was... me.
Maybe that’s what nostalgia is: the realization that all those small moments, the ones that felt like filler at the time, were actually the story. That the tiny things we took for granted — the car ride naps, the backyard gardens, the innocent crushes — were the biggest things all along.
Maybe believing in fairies just looks different now.