All I Have is Nostalgia

By Noelia Madison

When I was younger I used to wave at planes. In the house I grew up in and out the back through the sliding glass door that connected kitchen to breeze and garden lay the thick and sturdy deck stained cherry red me and my father built around four years after moving into the house. 

Before that there were small splinter-ridden steps to guide you to grass and tall poplar trees planted around the premises protected by the fence, we planted these a year after the move. A plum tree to your right. An apple to the left, slightly behind you, shadowing the office window. Questionably an apple tree because I never witnessed its miracle.

Maybe my sister and father's private study talks and the sound of my mother sucking on sunflower seeds or my brother watching light porn in the computer room bummed it out.

I have three siblings but only my father and I built the deck. I’d help him heist, or I would have. I think I've outgrown my loyalty.

The whole time hammering nails hearing him say and then yell so my brother would hear that it should be him out here helping, that that what a son was for. He never thanked me or kissed me on the head and told me I was doing great

The deck was finished. After school on spring days when school was out; and on summer noons I’d sit on the far right side of the deck where the ground slanted and the deck didn’t, so there was room to dangle and jump and land and roll and in winter you could fall into snow. I’d sit kicking my feet watching people walk by and cars drive by and dog and cats and sometimes a coyote way out in the field. We got a telescope soon after and I’d look into people's homes from the neighborhood past the flower field and above the ditch. 

There was a man in there who’d watch Fox News with a big jar of Cheez Puffs in his underwear. I thought he was fat and ugly and sad but I didn’t feel bad for him because my father told me people like that actually aren’t really people at all. 

On warm days when the air was quiet with white noise wind and only the birds were chatting I’d wait for planes. I wondered what it would be like to fly in one. Or if all of the people in the plane watched the window, waiting for someone to wave. The way I watched people on boats in movies wave across sea at other boats and to other people. 

I’d never seen or been on a boat either.

On a lucky day I’d hear it way before I could see it. Even in the house I felt a sort of rattle. I’d stand up high on my toes on the cherry red stain and wave both arms, sometimes calling an S.O.S. I thought maybe they had seen me and at least became interested or maybe even concerned but I was aware of my unimportance and my mother also reminded me often through action and word to face and back of neck.

Today I'm in planes quite often. I know now that I was never seen. I know now people are keeping busy on planes and I've been on a boat.

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I am six when I make my first ponytail. Feeling carpet with my shins down to the tops of my toes up to my knees. I search frantically through the bottom drawer of a handmade, stained-then-sanded raw wooden dresser my post-step-grandfather had made for my father many, many years ago, in Oklahoma. When my grandmother had eventually found a good man and inevitably let him go. 

Fortunately, my post-step-grandfather had wished that he kept it and brought it with him through all his stages in life. This is the only real reason he, out of all of my grandmother’s husbands and boyfriends, will always be my grandfather. 


The part of my father that forces his hand to do the right thing: allow my mother to eventually keep the house.

 (this never happens, but I like to think he had wanted to for this reason)

The stain had been removed two years prior to my ponytail, with the potential of being painted bubblegum pink and a Tiffany blue for me and my sister.

I was pink and ballet and Barbie. 
She was soccer, books, and late-night lamps.

I was an early riser picking garden vegetables. Of course, ballet was just an interest. I never got to dance because of poverty. 

My sister did play soccer for two years. During her second year and last practice of the season, she took a speed ball right to the tummy and fell straight back, turned purple, and was removed off the turf. My mother covered her mouth and said, “She’s got the wind knocked out of her.” This is my first time hearing the phrase, and I won’t fully grasp it until I’m eight, playing just above the stairs with my one-year-younger brother when he swoop-kicks my feet beneath me and I fall to my back, skipping a week of breaths and heartbeats. I cry after—not for pain, but fear of this new experience and proof of vincibility.

I catch a denim strap and pull out a pair of overall shorts that were still too big on me. I’m not sure where I had got them, now thinking it may have been my cousin’s in Oklahoma, a few years above me. There was an embroidered Dora and Boots the size of an unripe plum on the center chest pocket. I climb in the denim and invite the icon and her accomplice to join me to play chalk and walk around in my skin. 

I stare in the mirror for quite some time, noticing my smallness and thinking of all the space I now take up. It’s not as strange until you’re much bigger,  in your own apartment, taking note of all the ways you’ve changed and become. I’d like to stand next to her in her overalls and kiss her elbows.

It was there I decided to take it upon myself to fashion my own hair. With two sparkly red and green-colored hair clips and a pink hair tie with orange and red beads attached, I began to pull all my hair back behind my head and attempt to elevate the situation as much as my arms can reach. You don’t realize then, our heads are so much bigger than the rest of us.
 I struggle to keep my poor circulatory arms afloat.  I decide to flip and work with gravity, with my head near my knees, pulling my hair through the band as many times as my fingers can handle. Flipping up, I find I’ve done an amazing job. Chunky? Yes—but at the time I adored character. I love this look. I clip the red and green clips behind my head where I had missed some straggling blonde curls, and tug at the front, pulling out strands the way I see the high school girls wear theirs.

Out the door, through the hallway, past the laundry and my brother’s room, down the stairs, left, then left again, missing the leather recliner by a millimeter, then right. I stand in front of my mother and father, their eyes glued to the computer, discussing things I won’t understand at six. I clear my throat and grin. I’m stared at until I give away, with my finger and vocals, what I’ve done. There is a congratulations, a criticism, and I skip to the porch where I finish the night drawing chalk parents. I took out the ponytail only an hour later, as it was pulling on parts of my hair and my head was beating through my body.

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Noelia, a home grown Nebraska garden girl who is epically lost and continuously finding, Currently living in New York. She spends her time grounding through nostalgia and yearning for something else. Noelia is the Burning Palace intern and looks forward to writing a book a little too late in life