My father’s daughter

My dad saves everything. 

Pens from a conference he went to in ‘08.

Pictures of kids on his baseball team he has since forgotten the names of.

Old helmets, student ID cards, and handwritten notes.

The T-shirts he wore the day he met my mom and his old jerseys. 

Hotel keys that will never get him back into the room.

All these things scattered around our unfinished basement in boxes.

It annoys my mother who is on a constant quest of decluttering what small space we have at our home. It makes my sister laugh. 

I, however, am my father’s daughter. 

My sister often jokes that my dad didn’t need a son because he had me. Whenever I do something that causes my mom to be frustrated, she will laugh before turning to my dad and going “I wonder where she got that from”. In the Jackson household, it is often a constant reminder or at least a punchline to a joke.

What aspects of my life, of his life, of our life that my dad was unable to save in artifacts, he created in artifacts of his own. 

He filmed everything. 

(The chances you are reading this and have seen my dad holding a camcorder… very high)

If you are a high school boyfriend, a member of my third-grade class, or a lion cub in the community theatre Lion King, there is some version of you that exists on the tapes in boxes in our pantry. There are versions of me I have left behind that exist on those tapes. Naive versions of me. Immature versions. Sadder versions of me. Happier ones. Versions of me that couldn’t yet walk. Versions of me that I still do not quite understand.

I grew up with nostalgia ingrained in me. To take in every moment, with a slight panic that the moment was leaving. That might not have been the lesson he was trying to teach, but it's the one I walked away from. To hold on so tight to memories that your knuckles turn white. To hold onto them before they become memories.

It’s not a flaw though, but an extreme strength to view the world with such a precious emphasis that time is fleeting. A precious emphasis to enjoy what you have when you have it. An emphasis that we all rush for someday when someday is here.

I also inherited from my father that ability, or at least the urge, to capture moments. If you can’t physically hold onto them, you can have them in the form of artifacts. And that it’s not a bad thing to every so often rewind these pasts on the screen in front of you. It may just be why I have 71,000 pictures and videos on my phone. It’s why I struggle to throw away birthday cards. And sometimes, it’s why I hold onto things and people I have now outgrown.

Always being deeply nostalgic means you leave little pieces of your heart in the past, unable to take them with you, for fear it would leave that moment. There are pieces of me still sitting at lunch with my friends in high school, scribbling to finish my APUSH homework and discussing the possibility of prom dresses. (This of course was before the global pandemic when my prom dress got returned and the APUSH homework stopped. Not so great for a 17-year-old me who wanted to attend her prom, but perfect for a 17-year-old me who got a 5 on her APUSH exam when it went online). 

There are pieces of me left in my elementary school gymnasium, when I would wait for the days we had gym, so I wore sweats instead of a skirt. There are pieces of me in my freshmen dorm when I had no idea what I was doing. There are old pieces of me left in my grandmother’s house, a place she has since moved out of. There’s a piece of me still in stage makeup, back when I lived for performing in a private school auditorium. 

Although a strength, I still struggle with this extreme constant of nostalgia. I used to say I’d rather feel sad, than nostalgic. Being sad is easy, you just are. Nostalgia feels like happiness is within the reach of your fingers, but you can’t quite touch it, but you remember how it felt. 

Every moment I face I keep in the back of my mind that one day it would just be a part of the tape or a box in the basement. I spend nights wishing I could go back to those old pieces of me. 

But the beauty of life is growth. I can’t quite make room for new pieces of me, without leaving those small ones behind. 

And when I miss it all, I’ll always have the tapes. 

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.