Completely Subjective: Abigail Dembo’s “The Travelers”
On June 27, 2025, I was at British Summer Time Hyde Park, a festival in London, with my friends Emma and Ally. When I tell you I had an absolutely dynamite time, I am not exaggerating in the least– it was so fun walking around the festival grounds, seeing the sea of people full of moxie, dressed up in sparkly outfits, and all there for the excitement of live music. There is one particular moment that sticks out to me from that day, though, as I stare at a photo of it now in my scrapbook. In it, my friends and I are sitting on the grass and eating lunch a couple hundred feet away from the main stage. What makes this moment stick out to me so much is the thought I had as we took the picture– I remember missing the moment already, even though I was living and experiencing it right then. I was having such an amazing time and I just knew it wouldn’t replicated again, and for a bit I felt this twinge of sadness for me in the future, the me that wouldn’t be sitting on that same patch of grass by the main stage, eating that exact margharita pizza, with Emma and Ally, on June 27, 2025, at British Summer Time Hyde Park.
The good thing is, if you even just flip one page in my scrapbook, you’ll see that I have had plenty of good experiences after the festival ended and the PCD (Post-Concert Depression) wore off, moments that I look at with the same degree of fondness that I look at the festival pages with. Flipping through these pages, though, I couldn’t help but wonder; how much of our lives do we devote to this achy nostalgic feeling that clouds the live experiences right in front of us? Every school year I say I hate my classes, but then the next year part of me wishes I could go back to a day in a certain class because I end up missing it a little. Every summer I always wish that it was more like the summer before, but then when summer is over I see that the new experiences I had didn’t have to recreate the old ones to be amazing, and then I wish I could go back to the current summer without comparing it so much.
Nostalgia is such a complex emotion: it’s a reconciliation of yearning, grief, and acceptance, mixed with bittersweetness and joy. I feel the most important thing, though, is to find it in myself to accept that good things will happen in the future and are happening in the present, even when I feel stuck in a nostalgic slop with grief for those past joys. This can be really hard, but without it, my scrapbook would be pretty empty, and I would lowkenuinely still be stuck studying that moment on the grass.
The exploration of nostalgia is a hallmark of Abigail Dembo’s “The Travelers.” This prose poem tells the story of a woman who goes to a train station to request to return to “the childhood [her] father talked about…[with] the chickens pecking at silence.” She sits on the train with a man who is on a similar mission, heading back to “[w]here [he] can hear one strand of Dvořák practiced on a piano in a basement” from his younger years.
Although the woman is granted passage on this supposed time travel train, it is never explicitly stated that she will effectively return to that moment in her life. She simply asks the agent if her request is “reasonable,” to which he responds yes, and that “‘[her] train will arrive presently.'” The agent never confirms whether the woman will arrive at this specific moment in her past, but by saying that it’s “reasonable” to request this, Dembo communicates how frustrating nostalgia can be. This yearning for the past with seemingly rosier times is valid and common to feel, but in the end it is fruitless because no one can truly go back in time. The train arriving “presently,” which completely juxtaposes its purpose to go to the past, is perhaps Dembo’s message on how people can deal with this complicated emotion, though; one must swing back on the pendulum of being absorbed in the past in order to truly live and be present in the moment. Even if nostalgia is normal, it is still possible to work against, and it is even good to work against it sometimes, which is exemplified through the poem’s main character. The woman in the poem has no identity– the only thing the reader knows about her is she yearns for the past. This perhaps represents that constantly looking to the past leads to some stagnation in building one’s identity because it closes one off from truly living in and thus being shaped by present experiences.
This message is continued as the image of the train is developed. Dembo describes the woman as “knock[ing] the soot off the arms of a worn chair” as she goes to sit on the train, which is complete with a “black-and-white television” and a “squeaking fan.” Usually in the media, time travel machines are depicted as really fancy and complicated machines, and this run-down train hardly lives up to that standard. This almost feels like Dembo is emphasizing that the past be left in the past, as the moment has already served its purpose. A “worn chair” was once the best seat on the train, but now it’s nothing special; the old television was once the newest technology, but now it pales in comparison to today’s color TVs. Even though moving on from old times can feel sad or scary, the run-down train shows that living in perpetual nostalgia isn’t healthy, as exemplified through how the woman will breathe in “soot” instead of fresh air, especially if one wants to successfully advance and move forward in life.
In fact, the poem even ends by describing the woman as “restless as the snowdrift, restless as the small bones, the drum of an inner ear.” The woman’s apparent anxiety highlights how having tunnel vision of nostalgia can hinder one’s ability to appreciate the now. Despite the woman’s worry, though, Dembo’s vivid and delicate sounding diction remains strong throughout the poem; the “snowdrift” and “drum of an inner ear” feel like these quiet moments of reflection, described just as beautifully as the woman and man’s childhood memories were described at the onset of the poem. The present journey they are taking has the same capacity to evoke strong emotion like their past did, which perhaps encourages readers to see the beauty in their present day-to-day life, rather than comparing the past and waiting for the recreation of a moment that won’t come.
The train never arrives.