By Christian Adriel Tan (26S07B)

Where’d all the time go?
It’s starting to fly
See how the hands go
Waving goodbye

Where’d All the Time Go, Dr. Dog

Nostalgia is strange. It slips in unannounced, often in the softest pauses — between breaths, between thoughts — and suddenly, the past feels nearer than the present. Time never tells you when it is about to slip through your fingers. 

One moment, you are sprinting across the school field without a care in the world, wind sweeping across a face full of laughter. The next, you are sitting still, watching the hands of a clock sweep past, wondering how the days disappeared so quickly yet quietly.

I just want to be a little kid again, racing across the school field with my friends without a single care in the world.

I just want to be back in my secondary school classroom, sitting beside my best friend, slipping notes as if time were not already quietly slipping away.

I am too young to feel this old.

Time moved quietly, but it moved fast. And now, I find myself waving goodbye, not just to places and people, but to the version of myself who once believed those moments would last forever.

When I returned to my secondary school just a few weeks ago, I felt an odd, almost childlike urge — to run back to my old Secondary 4 classroom and sit once more at the desk I had claimed as mine. That desk had all the elements of home: the very spot I called my bed during English lessons, my creative space adorned with stickers and scribbles, my makeshift storage stacked with worksheets — arranged in the kind of glorious mess only I could make sense of.

But just as I reached the door, ready to slip back into a memory, I was met with a cold click: locked.

When I told my friends about my intentions, they laughed and called me boliao. They said I was being overly sentimental, that I had nothing better to do. Maybe they were right. But maybe I just wanted to sit, for a moment, in a space that once felt like mine. Peering through the frosted windows of that classroom, I saw my table had been given a new livery, a new personality. And it stung, just a little, to realise that the space I once called home had moved on without me.

Yet with that tinge of dismay, I still came away with a sense of calm contentment. That room held fond memories of laughter, friendship, and even scoldings. I knew I had lived those years fully. And as I stood there, lost in the soft glow of memory, I knew I had spent those days well.

Nostalgia could be described as a bittersweet feeling for moments that can no longer return, moments which have ended. But what makes nostalgia both tender and painful? What is the sweetness that initially overwhelms us, and what is the bitterness that lingers?

The Sweetness of Nostalgia

Nostalgia begins so sweetly and gently that you almost miss it. A song playing softly from someone’s speaker. A whiff of your old school’s canteen food, caught in the wind as you pass a hawker stall. A desk, just like yours, tucked in the back corner of another classroom. And suddenly, you are no longer quite here. 

You are seated once more at your old place, doodling in the margins of your notes, half-listening to the teacher, fully aware that this moment— this quiet, golden sliver of time — is already slipping into memory. The atmosphere hums with a kind of sweetness in a way that makes the heart both soften and tighten.

That is the strange magic of nostalgia: its sweetness is not pure euphoria, but the gentle ache of something precious. It tiptoes in unannounced, drapes itself over your shoulders, and holds you. Not too tightly, but just firmly enough to make you pause. 

We like to believe we remember the past as it truly was, but nostalgia has its own alchemy. It polishes away the rough edges. The laughter grows louder than the silence. The pain is muffled, and what remains is the ache you would willingly feel again, if only to return. Nostalgia is not deceitful, only selective. It is the memory’s editor, trimming the shadows, leaving only the scenes bathed in golden light.

This sweetness is not a trick of the heart, but a function of the mind. Research has shown that nostalgia often emerges during moments of uncertainty, loneliness, or transition. 

Why? It reminds us that we have been happy before, that we have been loved, that we have known joy, and therefore might again. It is a hand reaching into the past, not to retreat from the future, but to steady ourselves in the present.

Perhaps that is why it returns to me now, in these strange, quiet pauses just before and after a chapter closes. The end of school. The folding-up of familiar routines. The soft click of a classroom door that will not open for us again, no matter how gently we turn the handle. 

And it does more than soothe. It stitches our past selves to who we are becoming. The American Psychological Association calls this emotional continuity, a thread running through the many versions of ourselves we have worn like skins. We are no longer a child running across the parade square in a game of tag; we are no longer a child restlessly bouncing in their seat five minutes before recess, eyes darting between the clock and the door; we are no longer a child. But that child still lives in us. Their joy, their wonder, their large dreams — they echo in the marrow of who we are. 

Yet the sweetness of nostalgia is not just in remembering, it is in the resurrection. The past does not return as a shadow, but as a sensation. The classroom is not lost— it glows, dust-flecked and sun-warmed in memory. The voices are not gone— they hum beneath the skin, as familiar as your own. The laughter of your friends still ripples through the air like wind chimes stirring in the late afternoon breeze. In that way, nostalgia is a kind of magic that turns memory into presence.

There is a richness to this kind of sweetness. Not just fondness, but fullness. The kind that fills your lungs, wraps around your ribs, and slows your heartbeat. It is the knowledge that you once belonged wholly to a moment, and it to you. That something ordinary was, in its quiet way, extraordinary.

These aren’t just memories. They are messengers. Of who you were. Of who you still are. Of the person who laughed without restraint, who found beauty in monotony, who believed in the meaning of small things. Nostalgia does not just take you back, it reminds you that your story began long before this chapter. And that those earlier pages were radiant with life.

But sometimes after sweetness there is an aftertaste. And as with all things that truly matter, nostalgia, too, begins to ache.

The Bitterness of Nostalgia

For every golden memory, there is the quiet heartbreak of knowing it cannot be touched again. The song that once made you dance now only makes you still. The scent of canteen food becomes not a comfort, but a reminder of days that have slipped too far behind to reclaim. What once was a second home is now just a corridor; the laughter once echoing off its walls now flickers only in voice notes and shaky recordings. The desk is still there, but your place is not.

This is the bitterness of nostalgia: it reminds you, again and again, of what you can no longer return to. It is the ache of doors closed too softly to notice, of time passed too quietly to grieve. The very thing that warms you also wounds you. You are at once held yet hollowed. You remember, and in remembering, you lose it all over again.

There is a German word for this: Sehnsucht. A deep, yearning desire for something lost or never quite possessed, complemented by the dream of the “what-could-have-beens”, and the wish to escape a current reality. It is not pain, but a kind of longing too intricate for language. And nostalgia slips and lingers into that space where your memory does not match the present, in the back of your throat, in the pause between words. It sighs in quiet absence.

Psychologists have found that nostalgia can, at times, stir loneliness. Especially when it comes uninvited, when the past surfaces not as comfort, but as comparison. You remember the closeness of friends who have drifted. The ease of days now weighed down by responsibility. The clarity of a time when the future was wide and waiting. It tugs at our sense of identity, reminding us that we are no longer who we were, and that some versions of ourselves are now only accessible through memory. And in the present, with its uncertainty, you begin to feel the echo of what you once had. Not because you are ungrateful, but because you remember how it felt to belong so fully.

Sometimes nostalgia lies. Or at least, it exaggerates. It tells you that then was better than now, that the past was perfect, even if it never truly was. The longer you look back, the more the edges blur, until all that is left is a silhouette of something beautiful and impossibly distant. It becomes a kind of shadow you chase, but cannot catch. And yet we chase it anyway. 

That is the strange cruelty of it. We replay the old video. Revisit the old campus. Reread the old messages. Not because we think they will bring the moment back, but because we want to feel the ghost of it just one more time. Even if it stings. Even if it reminds us of what is no longer ours to hold.

Literature understands this well. In The Great Gatsby, Jay Gatsby is not merely chasing Daisy Buchanan, his love that he could never pursue. He is chasing time itself. The green light at the end of her dock is not just a symbol of desire and love, but of memory, of desire, of everything irretrievably lost. Gatsby believes, tragically, that it is possible to return to the past:

[Nick]: ‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’

[Gatsby]: ‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

But we know, even before the novel ends, that you cannot. The past, however sweet, does not wait for us. And when we try to reclaim it, it cuts. Gatsby’s dream gleams, but it is hollow. And in that hollowness lies nostalgia’s bitter edge. 

We see this in the world, too. Political movements frequently mine the past to stir emotion. “Make America Great Again” is not just a campaign: it is an invocation of memory, often selective, often distorted. Brexit was fueled by visions of a simpler Britain before the complications of a globalised world. These movements are not so different from Gatsby’s yearning: they reach backward with conviction, believing what was lost can be perfectly restored. But nostalgia, especially when unexamined, can blind as much as it illuminates.

Because bitterness, too, is proof of meaning. The ache exists because something mattered. We mourn the moment not just because it ended, but because it was beautiful enough to reminisce.

The Acceptance of Nostalgia

Perhaps the bittersweet is nostalgia’s truest form: not a perfectly airbrushed photograph, but rather a digicam shot— grainy, ever so slightly off-centre, tinged with a motion blur. It captures not just the image, but the moment: the pulse of a moment too alive to ever sit still, and a feeling that could never be compressed in the pixels of that photo. 

Psychologists call it emotional continuity; poets and philosophers call it longing. Whatever name it takes, nostalgia grounds us. It roots us in time. It reminds us that the chapters we have lived through are not lost. They are part of the story, even if they are no longer being written.

So when nostalgia comes, whether sweet or bitter,  let it in. Let it take you on the emotional rollercoaster. The gradual ascent as you’re pulled up by memory, steady and sure, with familiar sights. The view is radiant, and the sweetness comes in the rush of knowing you lived something worth remembering.

But then, the drop.

No warning. No goodbye. Just the lurch in your gut, the catch in your throat, as everything in the past vanishes in a blink. The things that once felt permanent were only passing through. The bitterness of knowing you can never really return. The rush is still there, but so is the ache, a blur of sweetness and bitterness winding together as the ride hurtles on. And just when you think it’s too much, the track evens out. You breathe again.

I still remember how it felt to run free like that, in the school field, and I carry that lightness with me even when life feels heavy.

I carry the slipped notes in the quiet corners of my heart as reminders that some bonds fade for new ones to flourish.

I am not old, just still becoming, and some parts of me will always be that child.

It’s over. But at least I know that I was there. I was alive. And in the end, that is enough.