I wrote this sometime in 2022 for a competition. I think the prompt was “childhood nostalgia” or something similar. I look back very fondly on this piece.

Nostalgia lies in the soft buttocks of an animated Panda smothering the angled face of a ruggedly handsome Snow Leopard. It dwells in the bulging eyes of that very same Leopard getting the wind knocked out of him by those very same buttocks. It lives in the soft pop that echoes as the buttocks release their clamp-like hold on the unfortunate target. It exists in the slow, agonising moan of dismay that escapes the Leopard’s mouth as he realises what is happening. It revels in the small tuft of tail on the Panda’s backside that wiggles in slow motion as all of the above happens.

…

No, it does, I swear!

As Po the Panda and Tai Lung the Snow Leopard tumble down an endless flight of ancient Chinese stairs together, exchanging fancily animated Kung-Fu moves, they participate in the climax of a 2008 DreamWorks classic — Kung Fu Panda. A particularly hilarious moment in this climax that stands out to me even now, seared into my brain, is a five-second slow-motion clip of Po accidentally sitting on Tai Lung’s face during their epic final showdown.

To me, this stupid, glorious fraction of time is a symbol of simpler times long past, and of childhood and memory. One of the most memorable parts of the movie, those simple five seconds scream nostalgia and child-like glee to me, with the movie itself proving to be an unending, brilliant source of joy to me as a child.

Watching it in the darkest brightly-lit room I had ever been in; first-hand with my mother and sister in the first AC Theatre to open in my city, their half-lit faces turned up to the flickering screen while I sat in between, sneaking away tiny fistfuls of popcorn from under their noses.

Watching it with my father back at home on our little computer screen, his big arm resting heavily but comfortingly around my small shoulders, with me looking up to him every now and then in expectant glee and satisfaction as he threw his head back in laughter at all the right times.

Watching it on my own, on the cute little Windows XP-fired PC that we had, the epic fight scene more than satiating my boyish wonder as I opened it now and again during my ‘computer time’, as children who are granted this facility often do with things that they enjoy.

Was every single time that I eagerly watched that scene back then not an exercise in nostalgia as well? I strove to recreate the joy that I had felt the first time I was availed that experience, through whatever means available within my grasp as a child. Yet now, there lies potent nostalgia in those very attempts themselves.

For nostalgia is capable of inhabiting itself in layers, like a snug sheaf of letters filling out a desk drawer; in ways that roam in lands beyond the strict, watchful eye of that withered and ineffectual simile — proud King of her domain, and of nothing else. Language is shadow here.

This reliving of the reliving of nostalgia is an extremely complex process to describe, for it is one that is both beautiful and dangerous.

Beautiful, as a repeated examination of any entity under new conditions can yield gorgeous, novel perspectives that only improve the underlying experience: The angle that a familiar guitar chorus is oriented at as it crashes into me, suddenly recalibrated and noticed. The chunky consistency of a brushstroke in oils as it lumbers into my eyes, greeted with a radically different optical handshake. The soft caress of a muslin-thin wind, undressed by my skin in more tender a way than I could have ever imagined. The forgotten taste of a spice, hugged effusively by my tongue, and recognised afresh by some long-replaced nerve ending.

But dangerous too, as nostalgia sits all too close on the bus to that cranky old neighbour — pain.

Let us not address that shade. It stands alone at parties, and we shall not buy it a drink. Avoiding that spiritless spirit is difficult. It requires a certain disciplining of the self, and a compass that points towards brighter poles. One that doesn’t lead you to flail and drown in those icy, loving, seductive tundras of pain.

But then again, that flip side of nostalgia is a matter of preference, really. I personally wouldn’t want to drown in an animated Panda’s buttocks. Least of all those of a Panda from 2008. (And not just because animation has gotten much better since then, smartass).

I wouldn’t want to do that because it’d be fucking weird, my guy.

And so is nostalgia, to be perfectly honest.

Let escapism do as escapism does.

So there!