A minor lifetime
2026 is the new 2016. Nostalgia bait. Y2kcore. Memory is everywhere and no one seems to know what to do with it.
The brief trend beginning in late 2025 and surging to social media prominence by early 2026 of #BringBack2016 has reminded me that my mom would be 70 this year. She would be indisputably old and I would perhaps be in the beginning of a transition when the child becomes the caretaker for an aging parent looking out at the horizon of end of life still fuzzy in the distance.
It would be a moment drenched in nostalgia. We would talk about memories of my childhood and how I’ve suddenly become an adult right before her eyes. She would tell me stories I’ve never heard and some that have been repeated for years with just enough details changed to seem new in her mind. We would argue about the need to think of the future and she would grieve the gradual shrinking of her world. 2016 would feel far away from the dire constraints of the present. For a minor period we would be buoyed by the past and it would allow us to continue.
In 2016 my mother was already dead and for what had already felt like a lifetime. Less than a year after her death, I ran from home in an effort to make sense of living. I buried myself in graduate studies and disguised myself in philosophy. I developed an intellectual fixation on utopia and the dialectic of hope and hopelessness. I wrote essays on embodied knowledge and land memory and argued that the seduction of the archive might sometimes limit our understanding of the kinds of lives people can and want to live.
I wanted to theorize my way out of grief. If language could somehow stitch together small, disparate fragments of time, I too could reinterpret my relationship to the past, to my memory of it, so that my mother could be someone else. It would be years after completing my dissertation and closing that chapter of my life that I realized all that writing about collisions and interruptions in the colonial state when people refused to stay dead was just another way of holding up a mirror to where I came from.
The past is irreversible. It is the future that we write it with that remains malleable.
When I think of 2016 I think of my obsession with a no-future and how certain I was that inevitably I would succumb to my ideations. It is all strange now, given my lust for life, that I was steadfast in my belief that nothingness was an inevitability.
In 2016 I was still so much a child in the ways that early 20-somethings need their parents. A decade later, there is a part of me that still only remembers her in a perpetual stasis of middle age; a woman at the beginning of another era of her life. Part of me is frozen there too, clutching my college degree and just barely relinquished teenage years, looking out at a future that seems impossible.
The odd thing about time is eventually the future becomes the present and we must confront all the ways it is and is not what we thought. In 2016, I saw nothing far beyond that open wound of grief that was rubbed raw every day. 2026 was a void because the thought of living this way for another decade was inconceivable.
And yet, time moves and I continue.
There are days when I believe I will write about grief forever and that the passing of time will always demand the acknowledgement of an unrelenting sorrow. In the twelve years since my mother’s death, this thought used to fill me with guilt. But at this brief moment when the world around me dives into the past, I think that maybe everyone is trying to fit loss somewhere. My choice has been to write as a personal monument to an unresolved past and in the process rediscover all the ways I’ve kept living. Maybe that’s all any of us are trying to do.
