Soft nostalgia: the summers we edit

I went back to my parent’s house in Connecticut a few weeks ago — the kind of car-ride odyssey that ends up being more about time travel. A suburban summer can pull you back into that grind quickly: Who will I run into at the coffee shop?

What part of my life am I prepared to share to prove I’m thriving? 

One night, a firefly somehow made its way into my childhood bedroom. I watched it float near my dresser and at first I thought I was hallucinating. But after adjusting my vision, I remembered what it felt like to be free. Before the world complicated that word.

The room used to be a deep plum color. Plastered in magazine clippings, soft and chaotic in the way only a teenage bedroom can be. My high school newspaper ran a spin-off of MTV Cribs and had featured it, but I’ll never forgive my friend for publishing the photos in black and white. It was vibrant. Now it’s beige — converted into a storage unit for the rest of the family’s memories. My attic, from whence it came. 

I grew up on a cul-de-sac. No white picket fences, but white picket signs that said, “Slow! Children At Play.” And we were. Before the internet, the summer plan was simple: wake up early, ride my bike to my best friend’s house three doors down, eat whatever her mom was cooking, and come home by dinner. Invincibility is often wasted on the youth. 

Of course, memory edits the edges. Nostalgia makes everything softer than it was. 

I’m one of those people cursed to remember every piece of critical feedback I’ve ever received. You’ll never catch me in a middle part — not just because I’m a millennial, but because at ten years old, a family member told me it “wasn’t for my face.” At fourteen, a friend who modeled in catalogs told me I’d never follow in her footsteps because I had too many scars on my knees. These are not the kind of memories that get posted into photo dumps. 

But there’s also the editing we do to protect ourselves. We remember ourselves as the protagonist, often forgetting that sometimes we’re the side characters — or worse, the villain — in someone else’s story. We clean up the narrative, smooth over the contradictions. We forget how much our actions ripple outward.

Summer nostalgia is always louder. I was a camp counselor for three summers at the camp I grew up attending, which meant I got to relive childhood from the sidelines. Watching the other counselors develop a gambling addiction at the arcade. Secretly getting good at bowling. Field day chaos, spirit day chants, the kind of secondhand joy that feels infinite when you’re nineteen and covered in Popsicle juice.

There are bad summers too — the ones that don’t get banked. Like the summer I got bit in the face by my neighbor’s dog when I was five, ruining my favorite shirt in the process. I started kindergarten that year with a bandaid mustache covering my upper lip. No one tells you that the first real scar you carry might not be something you choose. 

Other summers get heavier as you grow. The nights when you become a statistic of one in four women, the kind no one wants to talk about. You forget the details you gave away in grief, but it all comes back to you in the winter that followed. Insisting, refusing to go to school on a particular day without wanting to say the reason. Because speaking it aloud makes it real. Pressing your face into your dad’s sea green cashmere sweater which was the softest embrace of your young life. 

Not everything makes it into the nostalgia reel. Some things stay in high resolution, others fade out of self-preservation. 

You can first-name-last-name every bully from middle school on MySpace, but there are other kinds of memories that you don’t always have access to anymore. The kinds you’re quietly relieved not to carry in full. 

We don’t really live the “soft life.” We curate the moodboard version. Linen sheets. Long walks to nowhere. Summer tomatoes and rooftop spritzes. The version of ourselves that looks good in the light, even if it wasn’t that happy at the time. 

And that’s fine, sometimes. We need escapes. We need aesthetic joy. But nostalgia is still a kind of revision. It’s a scrapbook with missing pages. 

Soft Cuts Notes on Saudade — the Brazilian word for melancholy, nostalgia, longing for the past:

• Childhood summers weren’t that soft, but the way the sun hit them was.
• Your memory  is not a paper of record. It’s a remix that constantly is being reshaped in your brain. 
• There are things you miss that were never actually good. Often some of the things you’ve forgotten might have been better.
• Middle school bullies have LinkedIn pages now. You’re allowed to look. 
• That version of you you’re missing? She’s not gone. She’s just edited. 

Thanks for reading until the end. Soft Cuts will be back next week, probably with more contradictions.