In the Past, Might We Find Ourselves? // Simone Dalton

Nostalgia feels less nefarious and more like a necessity to me. The thing is, I have long been an avid listener of the stories and secrets of people far beyond my age. I have always consumed whole histories of loves lost and dreams deferred. I have always been haunted by a cardboard box of old utility bills and my mother’s expired identification cards and used cheque books. Let me be honest. I am haunted. Emblazoned with my name in black block letters, the box lives in the linen closet of a family friend in a country I no longer live in but will always call “home.” An album of my baby pictures was once stored there, along with another. The latter, its spine cracked and frayed, contained photos of mostly people I do not know. Dandy men and women with expertly coiffed hair from the ’50s through to the ’60s. I created lives for these characters, imagined the desires they hid behind their eyes. Every time I visit Trinidad, I pick at the contents of the box and decide to take something back. Back to Toronto. Or is it back to my childhood? This tendency has helped me feel less displaced, this necessity of remembering. As a writer, I am also drawn to picking at memory. Or at what Ana Rodriguez Machado described as “the way things really are, the way they could have been, the way they could someday …” in “The End of Something,” the last blog post in my Nostalgia the Nefarious series for the Town Crier. Sheung King’s “Pineapple Story” at the beginning of the series interestingly raised similar questions in ways that might surprise and delight you. Oubah Osman, Fiona Raye Clarke, and Sanchari Sur all reflected on the diasporic expressions of nostalgia and the experience of a sense of belonging. Radha Menon named the concept as a double-edged sword, one that can feed and starve our stories, and sometimes even our wellbeing. Derek Mascarenhas and Erin Kang each let us in to their own place-based hauntings of memories.I am moved by all of the writers who agreed to take on the challenge of the theme. I could not predict all the ways they would bend form and genre to attend to nostalgia. And although I did not know where this series would end up, I believe these words from Chris Bailey feel like a good place to rest for now: Story is a lens. So is poetry. Some stories are best kept in a drawer to stumble upon later and blush at the foolishness they contain. These visitations are your hands part way through the day. You shower in the morning, wash your hands as the day calls for. They’re clean. Then you reach out. You go to grab a glass from the cabinet, to brush hair out of your face or the face of someone close to you, and there is dirt under the nail of your thumb. Your hands aren’t as clean as you recall. They never were.

Simone Dalton is a writer and social change communicator. She holds an MFA from the University of Guelph, where she received the Constance Rooke and Board of Graduate Studies Research Scholarships. A work of creative nonfiction, her thesis explores themes of grief, sense of belonging and place, race, class, and inherited histories. Her work has been published in The Unpublished City: Volume I, a 2018 Toronto Book Awards finalist curated by Dionne Brand, and is forthcoming in the anthology, Black Writing Matters. For two years, she was the co-host of Guelph's Speakeasy Reading Series and recently completed a residency with Firefly Creative Writing studio. She is currently working on her first play for production with Rare Theatre. Simone lives in Toronto and was born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago.