Nostalgia Feels like a Heart Attack

Setting the scene: Live tweeting the first few episodes of Pokèmon, a beloved childhood cartoon.

“I wanna be the very best, like no one ever was.” Heart pounding, a million memories came rushing back. Playing, fighting, video games, movies, cards, and make believe. If you are a 90s kid, you know what this song lyric is from and you probably still remember the entire song, who your favourite Pokèmon was, and what their special move was.

Watching Pokèmon for the first time after ten plus years is a unique experience, especially when you “live tweet” it. Live tweeting is to relay information about an event on twitter minute by minute as the action is happening. Laying on a university dorm bed, hard springs with a hundred memories of their own living in the fabric, two screens glare and speakers blare with the iconic song, signally the beginning of an epic adventure. My back aches, my eyes are strained, my heart pounds. All other thought escapes my mind save for mouthing the song word for word, inflection for inflection. I remembered it to a tee.

The magic of the moment is broken by my first tweet of the night. The glow of my iPhone, and focus of trying to spell everything correctly in the tweet, distracts me from the show. “The theme song to Pokèmon makes me so nostalgic, I remember being in elementary school playing with Pokèmon cards.” My third tweet followed this vein, “Does anyone remember when Pokèmon cards were banned from school? I do, and it sucked. #childhoodgrudges.” The use of hash tags (#) brings more description to your tweet in a few characters.

My heart feels like it’s going to jump out of my throat and pound my eyeballs out of my skull. Why does nostalgia hurt so much, and basically feel like a heart attack? The intense rushing memories, every twitch of Pikachu’s ears, every turn of Ash’s hat feels like an old friend embracing me in their arms with a bear hug after ten years of absence.

I can almost smell my childhood home. I can almost hear my sisters racing to name “Who’s that Pokèmon.” I can almost feel my sponge Disney chair beneath me. Instead, I have a small dusty university dorm room, that is always so hot I want to gag, and the smell of stale beer wafting from the recycling bins in the hallway is enough to make anyone sick. The contradictory tones of feeling are so intense. My heart feels like a heart attack. The safe, warm feeling of Pokèmon playing, like a long lost photograph you haven’t seen in years, as opposed to the uncomfortable feeling of everyday existence in a dorm room, eight feet by eleven feet of avocado green walls and the shouts of floor mates a constant reminder of where and when you are.   

  I’m an adult child, there are many like me, who cling to the fabric of time with vicious claws and transport themselves to a simpler era. Cartoons, songs, and Pikachu’s thunderbolt attack are the closest thing to a real-life time machine we will ever have.