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It is a desperate feeling; one that is deep like a well and tender like a bruise. It is the way we time travel and it is the way we do not accept the present – escaping it, rebelling it, retracting into it. It is the romanticization of a lost past that is currently brutally unattainable.

It is the deeply encompassing state of nostalgia.

It came over me this morning as I climbed into my car late for work, anxious to get my day going. As I buckled my seatbelt, I looked down at my phone and saw a text message from my friend. He had sent the link to the Wicked trailer. And while, just moments ago, I was going through my to-do list that I was eager to move through, all of the worries of the day paused as I pressed play.

By the end of the three-minute trailer (if we are being honest, by second fifteen), I was crying. It started as a trickle. Eyes welling up. One tear escaping down my right cheek. The left cheek followed suit. As the trailer finished, I immediately went and put on Defying Gravity to listen to the song in its entirety.

I texted my friend, “I am crying.”

He said, “Me too.”

And suddenly, as the song picked up momentum into the crescendo moment of…

“So if you care to find me

Look to the western sky

As someone told me lately

“Everyone deserves the chance to fly”

I’m defying gravity

And you won’t bring me down”

…I started bawling. And through the chest heaps and dips, I saw myself as a thirteen year old girl and him as a thirteen year old boy. I saw us in the smaller conjoining room that lived between the main classrooms – like a jack-and-jill layout for a breakout space – wasting away our study hall, talking about our dreams.

Him, to be a broadway and TV producer.

Me, to be a magazine editor.

I remember the energy our eyes exuded; a twinkle of naivite, impatience, and wonder. A moment knowing that as we whispered our dreams to one another, our souls were ferociously imprinting them into our future.

We were best friends. And we were young. And we were hopeful. And we had dreams. And we wanted to figure it out. And we had our whole life ahead of ourselves. And we had the boldness to think beyond.

Nostalgia used to plague me in my early twenties. I used to retreat into the bogged down land of it, remembering things about my high school years that seemed better in those late-night moments than they did when they were playing out for my sixteen year old self.

I used to use nostalgia to escape, to feel pain, to inflict pain.

I used to use nostalgia as a way to say, “Not here, not now, not anymore.”

My early twenties were spent in a mountain of depression – of clinical mental illness, medications, and therapies. When I walked down a path of healing, I recognized nostalgia for what it was: a demon that kept me from my epansive future.

I cast it off, said my goodbyes, and wished it luck – for it couldn’t live within the confines of my soul any longer.

And yet, today it revisited. Today, it came through. Today, it reminded me what it feels like to hurt for a past you can never get back.

In that way, nostalgia is a pre-cursor or a sign of grief. It is the beautiful trip into your memories where you get stuck and can’t find the path back.

Perhaps it is the fact that I am still in my transition of motherhood with my 18 month old daughter. I have taken the motherhood pill and I can no longer unsee or see the things I used to. I can no longer access a level of youth, a level of selfishness, a level of reckless wonder.

I can no longer dream like my thirteen year old self did. I was her twenty years ago and I will never get her back.

But twenty years after I fell in love with the words of Wicked, the movie is coming out. It is giving me a sliver of a hope or a mirror of a dream that perhaps my thirteen year old self still is in there. That I can time travel back to visit. That I can see her, hug her, be her.

Because, after all, the woman I am today is because of the lines my thirteen year old self sang daily:

I’m through with playing by the rules

Of someone else’s game

Too late for second-guessing

Too late to go back to sleep

It’s time to trust my instincts

Close my eyes and leap

What have I been doing all of these years if not building upon the dreams, the wide-eyed wonder, the passion of my thirteen year old self, in a room of desks and chairs, alone with her best friend, talking about the future of who they would be, what they would do.

Perhaps nostalgia is the prerequisite for time travel. Perhaps it is the priming drug to show us that it is all a construct. Perhaps it is here to remind of us who we were, what we wanted, how we breathed.

I don’t feel any better with that sentiment but I do feel a level of acceptance.

And if there is anything I can say at all, at the very least, it was a gift that I got to visit thirteen year old me this morning.

She was poignantly great; smart, emotionally attuned, rebellious, a big dreamer.

And she built me. And so, in that way, nostalgia helped me meet my maker.