oh to be physically sick with nostalgia

it never fails to amaze me how every song i know has the power

to so aggressively bring me back to a specific memory, time of my life or person

that it makes me physically nauseous

sick with nostalgia

naturally, when i find a new song that makes me feel some type of way

i let it take me over for a few weeks

i play it over and over and over and over

suck all that i possibly can out of it

and even that doesn't feel like enough

i need everyone around me to love it too so i can share the feeling with someone

it usually dawns on me when i am listening to my new song, riddled with such intense bliss

and contentment

loving it SO badly

and that is when i realize i am already deep in the process

nostalgia in the making

and sometimes i feel the nostalgia right there and then

knowing that now this song too, will eventually make me ache for the very moment that i am living.

or the song is so perfectly devastating

and it was able to express an emotion or feeling in me

either with its lyrics or the melody

and it kind of cradles the hurt

it feels comforting

to be seen

understood

and to listen back,

it doesn't even matter how bad the time was, how much suffering was involved,

it will eventually, like everything

be looked back at it fondly

i actually don’t have the best memory

i usually need photos to be reminded of people i used to know and things that have happened in my life

whenever looking through photos i am always so surprised how much of my life i have forgotten

so as much as photos will remind me of the time,

when a SONG that i used to love comes on

i am shot back to the literal time and place

and i know the way my mind and body felt in that time

dying for you by charli xcx

reminds me so vividly of earlier this year when i quit my job and flew to Portugal to stay at my grandparents house alone for 2 months

where i spent most of my days laying under an olive tree

she says "all the pain and torture that i went through

all makes sense to me now,

i was dying for you"

for the first time, when i was there, it felt like i was in such divine alignment

like all of the suffering i went through before then,

had gotten me there

if the universe hadn't made me so uncomfortable in the situation i was in,

i wouldn't have moved

my old self quite literally had to die

so i be reborn

and now when i listen to it i remember that feeling

feeling like the world was mine in that moment

life so wide open

so excited to be free

i remember how pivotal that period was

how much bravery it took to do it even if it felt like the only option at the time

bleu by fred again

brings me back to wandering the cobble streets of some random city in spain

by myself

on my birthday

balling my eyes out

i was so thin and so weak and quite literally couldn’t absorb nutrients

the song literally just repeats “i just know that it gets better with time”

i would listen to it over and over again

as i walked around

when i was on trains

or curled up in a ball in bed

to remember that there will be moments after this one

it will get better

now when i listen to it i always grin

it did in fact, get better with time

how candy by paolo nutini reminds me of getting to the farm in italy where i volunteered

it reminds of sitting passenger seat of the truck

driving around to the small towns drinking wine and eating pasta

gardening, laying in the grass,

i was so happy in those moments

this was a new type of happiness

i didnt think i had ever felt before then

so disconnected from the life i was living back home

it felt like all of these new pathways were opening in my brain

it reminded me of how big the world is

and how many people are in it

just waiting for you

and i will miss my time there dearly

forever

and all of the songs that remind me of periods of time when i was falling in love

the group of songs that remind me of my first heart break

which at the time, felt like i would never love again, never get off the bathroom floor

and then the second heartbreak

the ones that remind me of my dad

ones that remind me of summer days driving around with my friends with the windows rolled down

ones that old friends have shown me

and when listen to them, suddenly i am reliving all the time we spent together

there are even rap songs that remind me of high school parties it makes me wanna throw up

not from disgust but from a time that i will never get to live again

how lovely is it to have an evergrowing archive of music

woven into all of our memories

what a beautiful thing it is to be human

love ALWAYS

avery

xo