dailyprompt-2169 – Stories That Are All True

Nostalgia has always arrived for me through taste. Not through songs or photographs or old toys, but through flavors that act like tiny time machines. A sip, a bite, a sweetness on the tongue — and suddenly I’m somewhere else entirely, with someone I haven’t seen in years.

One of my earliest memories isn’t even a memory so much as a feeling: my mother’s father scooping the soft center out of a Three Musketeers bar and giving it to me when I was a baby. I don’t remember the moment itself, but I remember the tenderness of it. The sense that someone was offering me the best part. It’s nostalgia in texture form — soft, sweet, and safe.

Mountain Dew carries a different kind of childhood glow. My grandmother had a rule: I could only have a bottle if she bought extras for my grandfather’s lunch. It was a tiny loophole in the universe, and she let me slip through it with a conspiratorial kindness that still warms me. The taste isn’t just citrus and sugar; it’s the feeling of being chosen for delight, of being let into an adult ritual for a moment.

Zero bars belong entirely to my mother. We used to share them — a small ritual, a quiet sweetness passed back and forth. She died in 2016, and we don’t get to share candy anymore, but the flavor still opens a door. Not a sad one, exactly. More like a room filled with soft light. A sweetness with edges. A reminder that some flavors hold people long after they’re gone.

Bustelo is the deepest note in my nostalgia map. My old chef, John Michael Kinkaid, and I used to go to a Cuban restaurant for lattes before service — a small, grounding ritual carved out of the chaos of kitchen life. After he was killed in a car accident, the flavor changed. It became heavier, richer, something closer to a daily act of remembrance. I drink Bustelo every morning in his honor. It’s not just coffee; it’s continuation. A way of carrying him forward in the work, in the craft, in the quiet moments before the day begins.

Not all nostalgia is tied to people. Some of it belongs to eras. Sour Apple Jones Soda tastes like convenience stores with humming refrigerators, like being young enough to think sugar was a personality trait, like nights that felt wide open and unplanned. It’s neon-green possibility in a bottle.

Cherry Coke is the 1980s distilled into one sip — mall food courts, bright colors, and a kind of sweetness that believed in itself without irony. It’s a time capsule disguised as soda, a reminder that entire decades can be summoned with a single flavor.

When I look at all these tastes together, I see a kind of sensory biography. Childhood sweetness from my grandparents. Shared rituals with my mother. Mentorship and craft carried forward through Bustelo. Youthful freedom in neon soda and Cherry Coke fizz. A whole lineage of flavor, each one holding a person, a moment, or a version of myself I’ve grown out of but never really left behind.

Maybe that’s what nostalgia really is for me: not a longing to go back, but a recognition that the past is still here, tucked into the pantry, waiting to be remembered.

Scored by Copilot, conducted by Leslie Lanagan

Daily writing prompt

What makes you feel nostalgic?

View all responses

The thing that makes me feel the most nostalgic is when I open my inbox and see all the e-mail I’ve received over the years. I never delete anything (in case that is a thing you’d like to know). I also don’t archive anything. I take the good with the bad, the chateaubriand with the Spam (“I’ll have your Spam. I love it.”).

WordPress tells me that I wrote 614,000 words this year, and I feel like every single one of them was dragged out of me to varying degrees. I wrote when I was elated or devastated. I wrote whether I felt physically well or that day was a disaster. I don’t know that I turned pain to beauty in all cases, but I do know that I wrote it down. It doesn’t matter whether it’s recognized or not; it matters in how much all my writing changes me.

Over the last 10 years, I have become more introverted and keep to myself. I think it’s always been that way, but at the same time, I needed to learn self-reliance as well. The last decade can only be described as “hard as shit,” but I’m looking forward to that getting better. It has to, because I swear to Christ it can’t get worse. When I think of everything that has made me who I am, the last 10 years have contained everything I needed to know to be successful by breaking me into a million pieces first. I hope that you never learn what it feels like to be hit by a partner. I wish for you even less that when it happens, people assume you did something to deserve it.

Some people think that about everyone no matter what, but I feel that when it’s just two girls fighting, who cares? Neither Dana nor I were in a good place, and we chose to handle it with avoidance and rage. At times, it was unbearable because I could feel her being nice to me because she knew I was ill, while taking no responsibility for being a factor in my downward spiral. If she’s not an alcoholic, I can at least say with certainty that at the time, she had a problem with drinking. She was not drinking the night she hit me, but she got a DUI and spiraled out afterwards. I did not handle it well, and I’ll never forget the people who stepped in for me when I couldn’t step in for myself.

Nostalgia arrives in the most powerful of ways from reading Supergrover’s old e-mails. It’s not because I need to live in the past, it’s that in a lot of ways, she helped me create a new future. But now it’s my work to do, and I’m on my own. I will never give up hope that the matter is not closed, but I feel it should be- at least for the foreseeable future. I am thinking that she has left the building, but I have no proof of that. All I know is that she’s hiding something, and she won’t tell me what it is. I would rather live the rest of my life without her than continue to tiptoe around her trying not to upset her…… and failing miserably.

There were two gut punches that I’ll never forget, and in order to erase them, it would take a lot.

She has said that she’s exhausted by everything and she wants to throw all my e-mails away.
She has said that I do not write her as a 3D character, that she’s always the same.

That first thing is easier to forgive than the second, believe me. I do not believe the latter is true, because I have talked about all the times she’s been avoidant and all the times in which I was absolutely ecstatic to even be on her radar.

I have written this before, but it is apt here….. “She walks in beauty, and I do because of it.”

I would not be the person that I am today had we not met, because she thinks so much differently than I do that it opened up new neural pathways in my brain. The logical jumps she was making were not the messages I would have gotten, and she doesn’t miss a trick (even with nachos). So, over time, I began to pick up her patois and my writing voice is totally different than it was in 2013. I’m more strident, and I take a lot less crap. But sometimes I go overboard, even with her, and that’s definitely what happened in this case. She made me strong enough to stand there and fight with her, but didn’t like her tone being parroted back to her, either. I’m guessing that’s because she’s a terse writer, anyway, and if you irk her, she’ll make sure you know it. But, then you push back, and she will fucking destroy the land where you live.

She also gives in to the other extreme, loving with wild abandon when she feels safe. I broke her trust, and we could not get back to “safe.” I don’t blame her- it’s a sad situation, not “Supergrover is a bad friend.” But as I’ve said before, I created the original break, and I felt that absolutely never opening up again was not the answer. We had to resolve our conflict, because otherwise, we’d keep being pissed off under the surface and people please until the end of time.

We are both guilty of this; neither one of us wanted to rock the boat.

So, in a lot of ways, when I’m writing here, I am only talking about the character, not the person. She has made it so unpleasant to talk about conflict and resolve it that I just don’t want to try until I have some buy-in. Actually, a lot of buy-in. None of this is fair- not the mistake I made, not the pattern we set up to deal with it yet not, not our treatment of each other when people-pleasing failed. I am sure I have been a frequent topic of conversation because everyone knows what I think, every day….. and not because I am trying to speak to anyone. The people involved read my writing, so they think I’m speaking to them. The reality is, though, that I am just as happy with using them as an illustration for people who don’t know me at all. There are patterns in everyone’s behavior, and I can see my own in stark relief.

Whether I’m bathed in light or shadow depends on where you’re standing.

So, in terms of nostalgia, the last 10 years are going to be monumental in my memory, because some of it is universal and some of it is alarmingly specific. In all cases, I loved hard….. but not often well. Sometimes it’s because I’m mired in my own crap, sometimes it’s because you can’t have a great relationship all the time and conflict is going to arise. If someone else is avoidant, there’s nothing I can do about that. I don’t have authority over anyone, but by the same token, they don’t have authority over me, either.

Adults don’t have authority over other adults except for asking them about things you’re making up right now, because they’ve probably made it up before. It doesn’t matter what the advice is about, we’re all making up everything as we go along. Life takes on a heightened definition when you realize everything begins and ends with you. It’s not how others behaved, it’s what you allowed. Trust your intuition, because no one else has your best interests at heart, even if they say they do- this is not always for malice. Sometimes it’s just that someone else’s idea of what’s good for you is, in fact, really shitty advice.

So, when she says “who cares what I think,” the deepest parts of my heart only have two words:

I do.