![]() ![]() Pulling petals from digital daisies - ‘he loved me he loved me not’ – I clicked mindlessly through a biography of before (a disclaimer here, harmlessly. To pass the locked-down hours, as I’m sure we all sometimes do, I was Facebook ‘nostalgia surfing’ ghosts-of-boyfriends-past. Now, as I think on this theme, there have been other strange circularities this week. ![]() I didn’t know then that this urgent drive would turn into one of the cul-du-sacs of survivorship – perpetual dead-end attempts to get back to a person that was gone. To luxuriate in the non-medical day-to-day and to live, with the difficult, simple knowledge of how sweet that was. All I wanted was my own old life - to get back to an albeit slightly elevated version of normal. I was trapped in the side-wind of the sick looking on at the blithe lives of the well, gliding unknowingly in parallel. For a time before and a time after that I thought would never come. As that airliner - wings forced downwards, plane pushed upwards – hummed forwards in the miracle of flight, I cried noiselessly. To a time when I was very ill, and didn’t think I’d get better (cancer believed to be terminal age 30-33 now 4.5 years in recovery). This film took me back to a transatlantic flight when, mid-chemotherapy, I watched it for the first time. And a new determinedness post-trauma - to live each day eyes open to its joys. During the course of the movie, a time-travelling meet cute develops into into something else: a love story between Dad and son, which captures the bittersweet longing for a loved, lost parent. Today, I re-watched the film ABOUT TIME – a tear-brimmed Rom-Com perfect for the Mercury retrograde prompt (warning: this journal contains spoilers). It let’s us travel the way a child travels - around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know are loved.” – Don Draper, MAD MEN Season 1, Episode 13 ‘The Wheel’. It’s not called the wheel it’s called the Carousel. It takes us to a place where we ache to go again. This device isn’t a spaceship it’s a time machine. In Greek, nostalgia literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone. About: Kate, from London, considers past loves and present selves before and after cancer. ![]()
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