On Going Home

Realizations After Six Weeks Asleep

Going home for fall break reminded me a lot of Troy Bolton. Probably to my cognitive benefit, I’ve never actually watched any of the High School Musical movies, but one of my favorite SNL skits is High School Musical 4, a spoof imagining Zac Efron’s character returning to his school a year after graduation. “Nobody sings at college!” he exclaims to a distraught student body. He’s also not even good at basketball anymore: “It becomes clear that East High plays in some sort of musical theater league with a very low standard of competition.” When Efron/Bolton is offered a chance to drop out of college and live in a perpetual state of high school, he and the students break into a song that begins with, “They say you can’t go home again, but here I am with all my friends!”

I thought about that line a lot last week. Can you really never go home again? That classic saying made my acquaintance several times in my reading growing up and I began to reflexively apply it to a lot of situations around me, like the difficulties of reconciling with a person after an incorrigible conflict, or attempting to revert back to a tradition or practice that the pandemic upended. Rarely had I ever applied the catchy “you can’t go home again” phrase to its most literal incarnation, but as a six hour train ride zoomed from Boston to Albany and a half-read Murakami novel sat in my lap, I wondered intently what actually going home would be like; whether it was possible. Whatever that meant.

There were definitely certain home-going stereotypes I wanted to avoid. I definitely didn’t want to be the odious character who returns to their old high school, expecting a reception of celebrity and warmth, and I am very grateful that - perhaps through my intense and overbearing fear of fitting even one-percent of the parodied stereotypes we all laugh at - I know that such a persona is wrong. Neither did I much want to hear the hometown gossip or happenings that could have been told to me in my lunch with my dear now-12th grade friend Grace. You’re in college now, talk about philosophy or something, not what those old teachers are up to! And when my friend Jack told me that he doesn’t want to be the type of kid to look forward to going home, I nodded along, agreeing that we should ideally like our returns but not love them, that we’re on a higher plane now in the form of college, that to quote Esther Greenwood/Sylvia Plath in The Bell Jar, “I was supposed to be having the time of my life.” So why bother going home outside of obligation?

Well, turns out that whether I liked it or not, there was something in returning home for me. My dog, my family, my friends, my car, my go-to boba place I so dearly missed…with all of this I can’t pretend I didn’t revel in my weekend. I fit in where I was supposed to, it soon felt really very normal to be in my bed and house and all, but even a week removed from this return, I’m still undecided on whether it is possible to “return home again,” and leaning toward the answer being “yes, but it’s going to feel a bit weird.”

Case in point: all of the chairs in my kitchen were new. It was somehow worse that they were not completely different from the old ones, but rather cheap and artificially smooth bastardizations of the set I had grown up eating, studying, texting, and writing on. They had the same structure, base, and color except that the wood pattern on the backs were curved in different ways (otherwise I wouldn’t have noticed it), and it was this cunning alteration that first made me feel disconcerted. Those chairs had not been changed since 2010, some 150 months ago, yet it was the one month I’d been away that they had to be overhauled in such a subtle and delicate way. Like a test to see if the universe would acknowledge my absence.

Another quite strange experience was that of attending a party of a good friend. The last time I went out before moving to college was at that same friend’s house, so coming back directly there once again in deeply different yet similar circumstances was eerie in of itself. But talking to people there was what really got me in a Proustian manner. Almost the exact same friends and acquaintances I had spent that night in August with and a few additions, I soon very blatantly found out that college doesn’t change most people, it just exacerbates the parts of our characters that were rising up to the surface and threatening to break through anyways. I’m not yet sure why this is, but it seemed as though the pretty thoughtful people came back intensely thoughtful, that the kids who would turn to dark humor here and there in high school now said the craziest things at every instance, that the ones really into dating and hookup culture were even more singularly obsessed.

Talking to a dear individual whom I always adore catching up with was especially jarring, especially since right before college began we had had a similarly deep conversation on this very friend’s deck, even with the two of us standing in the same spots, more or less. He and I bounced around tales of friends gained and friends lost since the great transition (developments once again that seemed to be exacerbations of trends presented in the waning days of senior year), and conversing him brought on a nostalgia so striking. It was dreamlike; I can’t think of a better thing to compare it to. As if the last six weeks was just a dream I conjured in my sleep, and there was no dorm room on the third floor, no inconsistently interesting classes, no squadron of acquaintances I found it impossible to figure out. Nope, it was just Aaron and I standing in the same spot we had been at the night of August 14th, and the entire rich and suffocating middle chapter that between then and now that was college did not exist. It’s compelling in part because if I am good at anything, it is creating stories to fill the gaps.

Time passes and locations change, but I’m not sure people and their relations do, at least not at the same linear rate. When my friend Shreya stepped into my car’s passenger seat last week, it felt so natural in the sense that the conversation we had did not change from what it normally was in high school: it being reflective, ponderous, comically deprecating at times. Both of us knew that the six weeks since we had last seen each other had changed everything about our worlds irrevocably, yet that complete overhaul didn’t reflect itself one bit in our talking that day. I don’t know why this is yet. Perhaps, as I have suggested, the core of our persona did not change and never will (maybe you can call that the soul) or perhaps we don’t notice any minor changes, and once we’re back home, we revert to who we were back then in some sort of tribute to the past.

A lot of things in our culture strike me as a tribute to the past. Think of those TikToks that seem to pop up every two weeks that fetishize something that is more or less Christmas 2010. Images of a school bus arriving in the dusk, paper snowflakes on a classroom wall, a table of cookies, picture books about snowmen, a voice that may or may not be Frank Sinatra singing, “From now on, our troubles will be far away.” I guess that we’re intended to stop in our tracks, revel in the nostalgia, forget the tests we haven’t studied for yet, forget we’re in a cold dorm hundreds of miles from home, and remember when times were simpler and such worldly worries weren’t present. But it’s not really like I spent my innocent elementary school years thinking, “thank God I have no exams! Life is wonderful!” so it seems to make a misleading point.

When one realizes that a good percentage of the entire entertainment economy seems to be designed to exploiting nostalgia, it’s difficult to stop seeing it. It’s why Disney is remaking all of their movies in live action, it’s the reboots of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and Gossip Girl, it’s the upcoming Harry Potter TV show on HBO, and Netflix’s coming-soon live action remake of Avatar: The Last Airbender, which I will unashamedly be the first to watch. Nostalgia’s the reason for the Barbie movie, the source of why Monday Night Football is such a successful brand, and it’s what will cause Taylor Swift to invariably break all sorts of records when 1989 (Taylor’s Version) comes out in a couple of weeks. Nostalgia is why multimedia conglomerates know they can get a quick dollar out of us.

It’s also the reason why we want to go home.

I think it struck me, both from coming home and coming back, that one of our most desired impossible goals is to reclaim an aesthetic. We miss people from our hometown for sure, but just as much we miss closing our car doors in the high school parking lot, the looseness of first-period on a Friday morning, that feeling of being in a friend’s basement on a weekend night, biking around at 6 PM in the spring and coming inside when the light turns dark to set up your laptop on the kitchen table for homework, and so much more. Our motivations in coming home to these same locations while lacking the feeling that provided the aesthetic’s lasting seriousness is not dissimilar to a Civil War nut visiting Gettysburg and trying to internalize themselves fighting (for of course the North) in eighteen-seventy-something.

It goes without saying that you can’t replicate an aesthetic (or force one on either; I remember last summer ordering a chocolate malt instead of vanilla when I was really getting into Anna Karenina, thinking that I’d produce a wonderful nostalgic association between that drink and that Russian novel, one that never came to exist). Trying to make yourself feel something by standing in the same spot you often did a year ago or hanging out with the same person in the same place is only going to produce unfun yearning for a better-remembered-than-it-was past after maybe a second-and-a-half of bliss. And in dialogue with others, it’s really easy to have those “remember when” conversations with longtime best friends, but it’s also cheap and stagnant. Pick your poison.

Analyzing the merits and paradoxes within going home just spits out our humanity’s perhaps unhealthy obsession with nostalgia, and a realization that no matter how old you get, you can’t age out of thinking the grass is always greener on the other side. Here’s an example of a paragraph I could have written this time last year:

Senior year is socially really fun and I do love weekend nights with all of my friends and the boba place I frequent, but gosh, I just can’t wait for college. I spend all of my time studying for stats and physics and a million STEM subjects I don’t care about, which is obviously totally different than what I will encounter in college, where I’ll be reading and writing about politics, literature, and philosophy and it will all be blissful. I hate studying for tests, but it will end soon because in college it’ll all be essays. Also, I’m working on a novel that I hope will be for-real published.

Here’s a paragraph, that when I’m feeling downcast, I could write now:

College is socially pretty good now that I’ve settled in and made friends (took a few weeks), and I do love the (new) boba place I frequent, but man, I really miss high school. I spend half of my life in cafeterias. I’m annoyed that spending sometimes ten hours straight working on my stuff completely alone doesn’t bother me. I spend all my time in a humanities-induced haze, flooded with gigantic amounts of Aristotle and Shakespeare and the Bible to a degree that renders me not at all properly processing them. Also, I’m working on a novel that I hope will be for-real published.

You can see the problem here.

Probably, it was going home that made me realize how pernicious and unsettling leaning on nostalgia can be. I had understood its dangers in a political sense for years, but never in a personal sense with this much clarity and elucidation as appears to me now. So as I close out writing this silly, wandering article with a title stolen from Joan Didion (cause who am I if not a walking homage to that woman), and I proofread over my first paragraph with a silly High School Musical reference inserted so everyone would keep reading, I’m not sure what has been accomplished by deliberating on whether you can really return home again. If anything, I’ve seemed to have answered the other question, the one whose answer is strewn onto the cover of my favorite novel, The Corrections, the one that goes something like, “Franzen’s novel shows us that you can return home again…you just might not want to.”