It’s weird to think that future generations of kids will never get to feel TV static. Retro technology inspired the theme of this poem about loss; but whether that’s a loss of love, life or simply time, is entirely up to the reader.

Phosphor fireflies danced and flickered behind my eyelids as my thoughts began to muddy and blur, my dreams quivering in pixelated sepia. The drunk luminescence of yet another familiar blanket of colour clicked into place and soothed me with its voice as I finally escaped the oppressive clasp of consciousness and surrendered myself to peaceful sleep. There I was again, exactly as I think I remember, reunited with my lost love in whose solace I confide, deteriorating but still beautiful as ever.

Did we drink coffee together that day, in a tranquil place bright with joy, the bumbling of life silent as if only we were there? Was that perfect place ever real? Could I still feel your radiance through waves of summer heat, rays of golden sunlight kissing our skin like warm prickling static? Was it day at all, or did the whispers of a calming breeze blow from a dark, starry night with you beside me?

Locked inside your ever-distant eyes was the reflection of a darkened silhouette, obscured by the lens of a camera. Were those eyes always as cloudy as the crying sky, confined behind a glass window?

Mechanical hums and white noise sound to me like the chirping of birds in softly swaying trees, the haze of weathered tape like gentle snowfall and glistening lights on a cold winter’s night, laughter escaping our fuzzy hearts in whisps of fog which now cloud my memory.

Was your comforting warmth always so chromatic? Our time together coalesced and bled like ink onto a love letter for no-one, your echo smiling in fast-forward again and again, each time fading further away from me.

Our time capsule had become my prison, I chained myself to your magnetic soul through the distortion of my liquid crystal tears.

How I ache for you to pull me into one last incandescent embrace.

Every waking second, I long for twenty-four more of you.

Reflection

When writing Nostalgia, I wanted to convey the themes of loneliness and loss, through a grieving character. It is intentionally left vague whether the person depicted in the VHS tape they are watching is a significant other who was died, or maybe an ex-partner, or even someone they love who does not reciprocate those feelings; but in all of these interpretations there is an underlying sense of yearning for another.

The poem blends romanticism’s natural themes with retro technology, by illustrating the beauty of nature and juxtaposing it with the sounds and “feeling” of CRT televisions and video cassettes. The contrast between human with the natural world was used to portray the narrative voice’s dissociation with reality, emphasising the idea of the dream that they slip into whilst rewatching video tapes. To the narrator, the real world is “oppressive” and they long to remain in a dreamlike state, preferring blending together unclear and altered memories with fantasy to being conscious. The use of direct address further strengthens this idea, alluding to the fading of memories.

I deliberately used whitespace between small sections of the poem, to represent the way in which we remember events, with only some key parts being left committed to our long-term memory and a vast majority cut out entirely, just like how in home video recordings large time skips are common.

The choice to limit the poem to 320 lines was also intentional. I mostly felt that I was able to write more creatively under limitation, but the specific number was chosen as there are “about 320 lines across a scan line” in the VHS specification according to Wikipedia.

I used the semantic field of warmth to represent the narrator’s love. The images of drinking warm coffee, the warmth of the sun in summer being compared to a television screen heating up, and the warmth the narrator feels when around their addressee, all reinforce themes of comfort, associated with love.