A Place Called Yesterday

Some people pass away without anyone else actually noticing until something makes it impossible not to. Others pass without anyone particularly caring, even if they do notice – people who touched no one and connected with little about the world while they were around.

But then there are those so beloved by all who knew them that no one ever quite stops missing them. Life is simply never the same once those lights are gone from the world – not for anyone. Yesterday was just such a presence, an entity everyone had met and known but taken completely for granted until it was much too late.

*

Everyone winds up missing Yesterday for the first time sooner or later, but for Jen, it started in her 20s. It was at that point that Jen realized for the first time that the world she lived in was no longer the same world she’d inhabited as a child. Someone had switched it on her one night while she was sleeping, and she could not figure out for the life of her where it had gone.

Christmas stopped being this positively magical time when the whole world wakes up and comes alive in a way it’s simply not the rest of the year. Summers stopped being safe, tranquil shelters from real life that seemed nearly endless in the most wonderful way.

Jen was still young enough to remember quite distinctly that things were very different not so long ago. She was the center of people’s universe, and now she wasn’t. Her only job used to be to simply play, make things, laugh, learn, love, and have fun. Now it was to push papers, peck computer keys, and answer phones behind a reception desk at a legal office downtown.

Jen now understood why her parents didn’t particularly like holidays or summers anywhere near as much as she did when she was a kid. And a little piece of her soul died a little each day.

In her 20s, Jen realized that Yesterday is more than a time or a concept. It’s also a place, and she didn’t live there anymore. She would never live there again, and knowing that was the worst feeling in the world on the wrong day. She mourned the loss of that relationship and genuinely regretted not recognizing it for what it was while it was still around.

But for Jen, some of what she had lost when Yesterday had left her was compensated for in other ways. Jen enjoyed the way people’s heads turned when she walked down the street and the way people older than herself would have done anything to be her age again.

She missed being a child – missed not having to earn the right to be alive or enjoy any part of the summers and holidays she loved so much. But she also liked some of the freedoms being an adult afforded her. She liked being able to travel, and dance, and drink beer, and discover herself. And for the moment, it was enough.

*

By the time Jen turned 40, that faraway place called Yesterday, where she’d lived as a child, felt like something she’d dreamed up another lifetime ago. Logically, she remembered the sheer joy she used to feel over the simplest things. She definitely still remembered how nice it was not to have a care in the world or any real responsibilities.

But remembering those things was like remembering something that happened to somebody else or a scene she’d seen once upon a time in a movie. At this point, she was not only fully aware of how life worked, but she’d become resigned enough to it that the thought was no longer actively depressing. It was just something that was there in the background, like a family pet that had become part of the scenery.

The territory Jen still thought of as Yesterday had grown over the years, though, by miles and miles. At 40, she now looked back on more than just her childhood with nostalgia and wistfulness. She was equally nostalgic (if not more so) about her 20s now. And her 30s, too, for that matter.

She missed feeling like she had her whole life ahead of her. She missed being in a position to take being young for granted. She missed the peace of mind that came with the now-defunct delusion that she’d never become her parents.

But Jen had become her parents, and not just in the practical ways – the uncomfortably comfortable marriage, the children, the mortgage, and all the aches, pains, and fatigues they’d started complaining about when they were around this age.

She no longer cared as much about the things that were so important to her when she was younger. She looked good for her age, but she no longer had much of a personal style – not like she did when she was younger. Being lovely and stylish was no longer the be-all and end-all in her life anyway.

She had more important concerns and other things vying for her time, like her new career as a journalist for The New York Times. And the book she had been writing for a long time, and truly did hope to finish one day. And taking care of the poor, aging body that she had flippantly assumed would always stay thin, healthy, and perfect all by itself when she still lived in Yesterday.

And it was getting clearer and clearer that she (and everyone she loved) would eventually die one day. Logically, everyone spends their whole life knowing that, but when you’re still close personal friends with Yesterday, that all seems too far off to actually be real.

As with looking back on the long-gone past, thinking about the distant future was like thinking of some other person’s life – like her mother’s or maybe her grandmother’s.

A friend she’d gone to high school with had died of pneumonia the year before. He had been the first of Jen’s classmates to pass away, but he wouldn’t be the last. There were only a few years left when the deaths of people from her generation would still be considered untimely. Some days, Jen already felt like she was living on borrowed time.

But age was bringing with it the priceless gift of self-awareness, something that was as mixed a bag as everything else monumental in life. By now, Jen knew many things were going to go straight downhill from where she was now. In another twenty years, she’d look back on this rather ordinary present she was waking up to every day and long to be back there again.

It made Jen wish she could step into the future for a moment and know exactly what she was going to miss most so she could fully appreciate it now. Time flew by so quickly these days, and life felt like it was perpetually stuck on fast-forward at this point.

And the beautiful, fondly remembered land of Yesterday was evolving into a pinpoint in the rearview mirror more quickly all the time.

*

The thing that had surprised Jen the most about the future was how similar it seemed to the past. Not Yesterday, per se. Just the past. There were no flying cars, no casualwear made of metal, and no shops or facilities run entirely by robots. There was this amazing connectivity that the web and the metaverse had brought to the table, but that had been there in some way, shape, and form for a while now.

Here she was, 80 years old and in the twilight of her life. She didn’t know precisely when the sun was going to go down on what was left of her existence. What she did know was that every time her eyes opened to find herself alive and breathing in her bed, she was overwhelmingly grateful.

She was old now by most people’s standards. Everything hurt. But she loved life, and she loved the imperfect world she lived in. She was going to miss it when she didn’t live here anymore, even more than she’d missed Yesterday for most of her life.

Her husband was long gone by now, as were both of her brothers and her sister. Her children had long ago moved to the far corners of the earth to build, miss, and mourn their own Yesterdays. So she’d moved to a retirement home.

She’d always thought that if she’d ever wound up in a retirement home, she’d hate it. But it wasn’t so bad, really. There were other people here that she could talk to and pass the time with. They remembered and cherished the version of Yesterday she remembered because they had been there, too. She missed the days when she was able to be more of an active participant in life, but having people to miss things with was strangely comforting.

Jen thought that knowing the end was this close, that it could be any day now, would be scarier than this. But it wasn’t.

In a way, it was comforting to know that she’d soon be going back to the place she’d missed ever since she’d left childhood. She would see her husband again, her brothers and sister, her parents and grandparents. Her childhood pets, and her poor classmate who had left the story when he caught pneumonia on the threshold of middle age.

She would become part of other people’s Yesterdays, and that made her happy to think about. Maybe that’s what heaven really was – a return to the golden bliss where everything is always beautiful.