There’s a place where I’m still 22, and a show to take me there

I think I’ve discovered a glitch in the universe. Somehow, lately, I’m able to dip out of the present moment and into one from long ago, transported in a blink between now and then and back again. It’s a magic trick. It’s entirely out of my control.

It started the other day. Still procrastinating about the important things in my life – the deadline on my next book that I’m about to push for the third time, skin cancer checks long overdue, regrouting my shower – I went searching for an old show to rewatch and landed on Girls.

That’s when it happened. Four seasons deep and long past midnight, I sat up in bed with the strangest sense that I was 22 again. Watching Hannah, Jessa, Shoshanna and Marnie struggle to navigate their new adulthood, jumping between cash-in-hand jobs and identity crises, it was all so familiar that time travel was the only explanation. Every worry I ever had about who I was going to be was back. I was insecure again, overwhelmed again, a miniature narcissist again, dating psychopaths and performing independence. Only once the credits rolled was I 33 once more.

Credit: Robin Cowcher

This isn’t simple reminiscence. I’m not perusing memories like a photo album, tapping on Polaroids and trying to trigger a very specific strain of nostalgia. I already know that the first note of Perfect Day by Lou Reed prompts half an hour of inconsolable sobbing because it was playing when my dog passed away last year. I already know that Flowerbomb by Viktor & Rolf smells like the year I turned 18, moved to England, and fell in love with a boy I’d never see again.

Notable events and reliable triggers – that’s just too easy. I’m talking about the snippets of life in between the defining moments, so seemingly insignificant that I’m amazed I still have the memories on file.

Deep into an instrumental focus playlist, one song features the twang of a balalaika, and something familiar stirs in my gut. One minute I’m at my desk, and the next I’m watching Doctor Zhivago on my paternal grandmother’s couch 25 years ago. It’s only now that I can make the connection between this memory and my lifelong fascination with both Russia and men with supremely bushy moustaches.

One sip of a particularly cheap and acidic white wine puts me back in Edinburgh, sitting on church steps with a stranger from Tinder, passing the bottle back and forth while we watch a 10pm sunset. I can’t hear a single song from Taylor Swift’s 1989 album without believing, just for a second, that I’m back at a park in Rose Bay on the first day I brought my old dog home. Every corner I turn, every song that comes on shuffle, every trinket I lift off its shelf, I’m pulled out of my body and back through time.

Maybe I’ve been locked up alone in my apartment too long. I only venture out into the world to pick up groceries and take my new dog to the park, hardly speaking to another person unless it’s through a screen. I’ve been stuck around 70 per cent of the way through my next book for about six months now, and no matter what I try, I can’t seem to move forward. It only tracks, then, that I go backwards instead.

Each time I go back in time, I try to stay a while. With my red pen out, I set about making edits and writing fresh context into old memories. This is an anxiety thing. This is a lesson about control. If I could just rewrite the past, I could change the future, too.

The thing about memories is that they’re unpredictable and unreliable. You don’t know you’re making them until they’re made. While I’m busy with my nostalgia, new connections are forming. In five, 10, 30 years’ time, I’ll hear the snippet of some song currently trending on TikTok and I’ll be right back here again, creatively blocked and over-caffeinated, writing this column about being 33 and 22 at once.

It’s comforting, in the end, to learn that nothing is ever really lost. Every version of us is still saved in our archives, just waiting for the right song, an old perfume, or a throwaway line from a forgotten character to reappear and remind us of things we thought we’d forgotten.