As a writer, I live in my head. What am I gonna do, move? The place has never been cleaned. Ever. So subletting might be a little tricky. Besides, I was sorta grandfathered in.

Most days it’s not so bad. Just a little noisy. See, ‘cause I got roommates. Everybody’s got roommates. And if you think you don’t, then guess who’s got the bigger room. But my roommates seem to be messier than most. They like to throw lots of parties. There’s the pity party, the where-did-I-go-wrong party, the everyone-seems-to-get-it-but-me party, and of course the but-I-can’t-get-a-job-doing-anything-else-now party. That one draws quite the crowd. Good times.

One of the more insidious events my head likes to play host to is nostalgia. This of course is normally accompanied by complaints from the annoying upstairs neighbor. She’s a chatty type who—microbrew in one hand, attitude in the other—likes to remind the rest of us that nostalgia is just yet another way to attach humanity’s fragile psyche to something over which we have no control, something in fact that doesn’t even exist. Like I said, she’s annoying.

But she’s persistent. So I started going to the door more often to hear her rant firsthand since my roommates can be highly unreliable messengers. Besides, my writer’s arsenal of excuses not to face the page isn’t always stocked. Sometimes I have to improvise.

So maybe it was the excuse hunger talking. Maybe it was the smell of amber on her breath. I’m a sucker for sultry suds. But darn it anyway, the dame, she was starting to make some sense. Some of my roommates had to take off. Couldn’t take the heat in my kitchen when suddenly she lights up a smoke and lets its trail waft between us like a sign, a clear warning to keep my distance. I tried, you know. I did. But I gotta admit the broad had a point.

With all this recent talk of stimulus packages and billion dollar bailouts, she had a salient vehicle. And she used it to make her point. Lofty notions love mundane anchors. And smokers love to watch their breath as they talk. It’s their built-in Marlboro and mirrors, a convenient trick that lends weight to the content of whatever words happen to be riding the exhaled carcinogen.

So she says that nostalgia is both the Great Debt and the Great Loan. And like much of Wall Street’s facts and figures, its reality is simply an illusion. Nostalgia represents a moment, a moment with meaning. It was loaned to you, and then you had to return it. But you returned too much. A piece of you was left inside that moment. Now the moment both owes and owns you. And it’s gone.

So basically, it seemed to me that she was trying to accuse the act of waxing nostalgic of being both a symptom of, and precursor to, being in the dumps. And why would she make such an assertion, I ask, eyes stinging now from what I hope is her smoke. Because, she says, nostalgia is the romance of time when time has erased romance. It’s the love of songs from the past because they soundtracked the future we dreamt of. It’s the reminder that youth is at once the place where mistakes seem endlessly afforded and the gateway to where they’re endlessly lived.

Because it’s another time. And another time is always dead. Have we learned nothing from Icarus, she asks. We can’t wax nostalgic any more than we can wax wings without risking a perilous fall back to earth.

Of course by this point, as you might imagine, my upstairs neighbor has finished her beer and lost her humor. So she crumples up her empty pack of smokes and angrily proclaims that nostalgia is, above all, a waste of time.

She then turns indignantly toward the stairs, and, though her ass has gotten a lot bigger in the time I’ve known her, it gets smaller and smaller as I let her disappear. I close the door, tired but quite satisfied that none of what she said actually applies to me. ‘Cause by this point of the party the reason she ran out of beer is because I finished them all. So the best thing I can say about my memory is I remember when I had one.