Nostalgia’s Weight

Why I obsess over the past and what it’s teaching me about my mother

I have this unexplained craving for the past.

It pulls at me like an ex I can’t let go of, seductive and insistent. It’s a world I can return to when the present overwhelms me.

It’s not just the memories I crave, it’s the illusion of control they offer — the ability to make chaos meaningful. I feel like I’m on a constant quest to find meaning in the darkest corners of my past as if understanding those moments could somehow validate them. And me. Maybe it’s also a way of confirming the propelling but pacifying notion that “everything happens for a reason.”

This craving came to me recently as I wandered the streets of Orlando, a city I once called home.

Orlando lived in my memory like my favorite fairytale, blurred by the years but still glimmering with that Disney-esque magic. I spent part of my childhood there, frizzy-haired and sun-kissed, in what my ten-year-old self knew as my mother’s dream house. To me, it was a castle, with its high ceilings and sprawling rooms. In 2005, Orlando was vast yet safe, a world where I could scooter through quiet neighborhoods that stretched forever.

But even in those childhood dreams, Orlando was where I first learned how fragile stability could be. It’s where I watched my mother, even in the face of uncertainty, defy the odds. A young Latina, she left everything she knew to chase a better life. She climbed the corporate ladder with impossible grit, determined to rewrite her story despite the barriers in her way.

She bought that house, her dream house, and turned it into a home filled with music, laughter, and the scent of Caribbean cooking. She hosted parties regularly, inviting joy in even as pain sat quietly in her corner. It was as if she refused to let hardship define her. She believed in joy as an act of resistance, a way to create meaning when life was spiraling out of control.

I was too young to understand what it cost her to keep going back then, in Orlando, to keep building a life on unstable ground. In the wake of the 2008 recession, our dream life became just an ordinary life. One where my father left, again and again, to chase his entrepreneurial dreams despite it all, and where my mother was forced to figure it out on her own, until she lost her job and, eventually, our home.

For most of my life, I’ve resented the finality of that Tuesday afternoon. I came home from school to find our lives scattered across the lawn, watching her pack the car with whatever she could fit to drive us back to New York, a place we’d left years prior. At the time, I didn’t know the strength it takes to let go of what was and begin again.

The truth is, I’ve always been proud to call New York home. Even as a kid in Florida, I felt the need to cement my identity as a New Yorker in every new encounter. This city is my anchor, woven into my voice, my pace, my nerve. It’s where I was born, in the same hospital as my father. It’s where my mother arrived as a child from the Dominican Republic. It’s where my family built generations in small apartments held together by Section 8. It’s where I learned to survive, to dream, to believe that becoming was possible.

And so, for a long time, I didn’t think about Orlando much at all. More than a decade passed before I found myself walking the streets of our old neighborhood again, looking for something I couldn’t name. Nostalgia promises clarity and connection to the girl I once was. But what I found instead was the weight of memory and the guilt of my resentment.

I had hyperfocused on the cataclysms. The moments when stability shattered, when the dream slipped from our grasp. I blamed her for the decisions I didn’t understand, for the goodbyes I hadn’t been ready to say, and for the chaos that made up the parts of this story that I won’t write about here. The truth was, Orlando wasn’t magical. The city held my childhood traumas in a suffocating grip. That’s probably why I didn’t think about it much. But anger was easier than sadness. So, blame became my way of making sense of it all, as if pinning it on my mother could bring order to a past that felt uncontrollable.

But as I stood on those streets, the Orlando I longed for existed only in fragments: a golden-hour sunset, the sound of sprinklers hissing and palms rustling, the smell of wet grass, the hum of cicadas in the marshes that are now gone. The fairytale I’d held onto had disappeared, replaced by parking lots, condos, and an increasing number of green Publix signs. The disconnect between my memories and this reality was jarring, yet it taught me something about change.

The city had changed, and so had I.

The more I walked, the more I began to see how much time had passed, not just in Orlando, but in me. I had clung to a version of the past frozen in my mind, as though preserving it could keep it alive. But the truth is, I wasn’t holding onto the past itself. I was holding onto the blame, the resentment, the weight of what I thought should have been different.

And in doing so, I had obscured the fullness of my mother’s story. Nostalgia had softened my memories, but it had also hidden her sacrifices in the folds of time. I hadn’t seen her determination in those moments, the way she laughed through the exhaustion at those parties, or how quietly she carried grief. I hadn’t seen her resilience for what it was: a refusal to let hardship define her or her family.

Nostalgia is teaching me to hold the past more gently, to see it as something layered and unfinished. To trust the girl I was, the mother she was, and the ways we both grew in a world that never stood still. It reminds me that the life unfolding before us is possible because of all we’ve been.

My past is my favorite story. So, I hope nostalgia will always visit me. Especially now that I see it for what it is: not just a longing for what was, but a love letter to the places and people that shaped me, and a thank-you note to my mother, who taught me to keep chasing joy, even when pain lingered.