Remy spent three weeks preparing for a Biloxi Shuckers promo night. I want you to sit with that.
Not three weeks of casual, drifting anticipation. Three weeks of system development. He had a notes app document titled "Operation Throwback (working title)" and a Pinterest board he described as "mood architecture" and at least two phone calls with his cousin in Pascagoula who apparently confirmed that yes, bleached denim was correct, and yes, it was coming back, and no, Remy did not need to buy new bleached denim because the pair he'd kept in a plastic bin under his bed since 2016 would be, quote, "more authentic."
He showed up to my apartment at 5:45 in the bleached denim and a button-down with exactly two more buttons undone than were necessary, wearing a cologne that I recognized immediately and involuntarily, the way you recognize a song that played during a minor car accident. He had also, somehow, reassembled the smirk. The specific Snapchat-era smirk. The one where you're looking just slightly to the left of the camera because you've decided you have a good side and the world should know it.
"Is that Axe?" I asked.
"It's not not Axe," he said.
It was outside already doing what Gulf Coast evenings do in May — that thick, damp warmth that sits on you like a second outfit, no matter how nice the weather technically is. Remy did not appear to notice. He was too busy explaining his theory.
The theory, as best I could transcribe it while also finding parking on a street that still smelled like construction dust from whatever is happening on every road in this city simultaneously, was this: nostalgia is not a feeling. It is a transferable competency. And if you recreate the conditions of a good era with enough precision — the outfit, the music, the energy, the specific cologne choices that should probably stay in the past — you can install that feeling in other people. Like a software update. For emotions.
"You can teach people to feel nostalgic," he said. "I'm going to do it tonight."
"To who?" I asked.
"Whoever's there," he said.
There were a lot of people there. It was a good crowd, warm and loud, a mix of families and groups of friends and a man in a Top Gun costume who had either not noticed or actively refused to accept that Top Gun Night had been last week. Remy surveyed the scene with the quiet confidence of someone who has prepared extensively for a moment that does not know he is coming.
He started with the couple next to us in the bleachers. Mentioned the denim. Mentioned the year. Said something about how "we all knew who we were in 2016" in a tone that suggested he had rehearsed it. The woman looked at her husband. The husband looked at his Shuckers hat. There was a pause that lasted approximately one full at-bat.
"My mom got a Snapchat in 2016," the woman offered.
"Exactly," Remy said, and pointed at her like she'd just confirmed something.
I ate my peanuts. A kid two rows up was watching something on her tablet, and I could hear the faint audio from Bluey drifting back through the humid air, which felt correct. The Shuckers hit something and the crowd did the crowd thing and Remy, undefeated, pivoted to a group of college guys who had not yet developed the emotional defenses to walk away from him.
He was over there for twenty minutes. I watched from a safe distance. At one point I saw him mime taking a Snapchat selfie to illustrate a point. At another point I saw one of the college guys actually pick up his phone, presumably to look up whether 2016 nostalgia was real, and then presumably find out that yes, technically, it is a thing people are doing online right now, which I knew was going to make Remy insufferable about this for the rest of the summer.
He came back during the seventh inning stretch looking satisfied in a way that I did not have the heart to interrogate.
"How'd it go?" I asked.
"Good," he said. "I think they felt it."
"Felt what?"
"The nostalgia," he said. "I transferred it."
On the drive home, with all the windows down because of the cologne situation, he was already revising the notes app document. Adding bullet points. Refining the system.
I have been with this man for two years. I understand, now, that this is just what the years are going to be like.