Walking Through Memory
September 7th, 2025
A lot of the trip was as I expected. The moment we landed, I began pointing at practically every object in my view and telling Neha about some winding connection between it and my childhood. The most significant nostalgic episodes took place in grocery stores. Every Coop and Migros we walked into, I was picking up bread and snacks and chocolate and drinks and anything I could find that I remembered from when I was a pre-teen. We spent more money on snacks to indulge my nostalgia than I care to admit. All this was great and fine and expected. I have worn a Coop keychain on my pants for over six years now—I had anticipated every one of these rushing feelings of nostalgia. I assumed Winterthur would be the same.
I was undoubtedly excited about returning to the city I had lived in for six of the first years I can clearly remember from my childhood. I knew it would inevitably feed the Nostalgia Goblin™ that lives inside my brain. Yet at the same time, I had tempered my expectations. I didn’t want this city I so fondly remembered to be tainted by my exceedingly high hopes for a grand homecoming. I decided to be cautiously enthusiastic about it all. But as soon as I stepped off the train and looked around, a tsunami of memories washed away any hope for a cautiously enthusiastic day and replaced it with an enigmatic trance.
I am an awfully nostalgic, sentimental person. I hoard items and prescribe them arbitrary significance because they might have been somewhat important to me at a point in my life. I have always found a great joy in reminiscing on things that have long since passed. I do not hold many regrets, I do not yearn for a lost time, I do not grasp on to memories as a way to remember the time I peaked in life—I do not live in the past, but I do make sure to revisit it often. Going back to Switzerland for the first time in over a decade might be the most direct manifestation of that.
After ogling the apartment building’s exterior for what onlookers surely described as a creepy amount of time, I led Neha down the route that I used to take from home to school. Not needing to use a map to get from one place to the other further pushed me into an inexplicable reverie. I was thrown back into a routine I had long abandoned but clearly never forgotten.
The entire day, I was hovering above the ground. Not flying, not jumping up and down, not trembling from excitement. Just a small, pleasant hover that kept me in a state of uninterrupted meditation. I was gliding through the streets of my own memory and reviving the child that had been lost to time and work and age and life.
I lived at Kurzstrasse 1 for the majority of the time I spent in Switzerland. Walking from the bus stop a few blocks away down to the apartment building I grew up in was an overwhelmingly surreal experience. I spent over 13 years daydreaming about these tentpole locations of my childhood. Where I lived, where I went to school, where I ate, where I played. When I would think back to this city (which is far too often), I pictured these streets and buildings and routes and my relation to them in grave detail. Actually being there and walking down those same
streets I had been imagining for over a decade, I felt untethered to the earth. It was as if I was still inside of those memories I had been replaying in my head for so long. A white, hazy glow illuminated the outlines of every object in my sight. Time felt inconsequential to the present and I began to genuinely feel what I can only describe as a peculiar transcendence.
I don’t really know what to make of this trip. I want to say I’ve learnt something about myself but I’m honestly not sure what that is. My tendency to indulge in nostalgia was already evident to me, even when I was younger. I think I’ve realized being sentimental is merely caring about things. I care about these things because they mean something to me—I refuse to be ashamed of that. Maybe there is a lesson somewhere here about holding on to the memories that you find to have significance instead of discarding them in exchange for new ones. I find
that in the limited brain space I have, memories take precedent for me over most things. I want to remember that I was happy, because sometimes I forget. It becomes easy to think you’ve been miserable your entire life when the current misery you are facing is paramount to everything else in your mind. It seems to me that holding on to your past joy is often essential in remedying your present pain. I am never letting go of the little me, I am convinced he is more important to my life than I understand.
Thank you for reading my self indulgent recounting of the strangest day I’ve had so far in my capricious life. I hope you too can feel as I felt, if only to experience a new kind of uncatalysed high.