scarred tissue

love-island inspired musings about life, tears and time

Love island is back.

This, like a special breed of birds ushered in by the warm winds, is an indicator that summer has arrived. I don’t remember exactly when Love Island became synonymous with summer for me (probably pre-pandemic, which automatically feels lifetimes ago), and I do wonder how long its cultural reign will persist before we tire of watching strangers tongue kiss over fifty-episode seasons. But for now, day one at the villa feels like the beginning of a new chapter for us all—new friendships, romances, swimsuits and memories await for both the contestants and the audience. It’s a charming occasion.

Beyond being just personally exciting, Love Island is also a communal experience. As the show has grown in popularity over the years, more and more people join in on the ritual of tuning in every night to live-tweet their reactions to the episodes’ developments using the Love Island hashtags. These hashtags put the conversations all in one place, which is half of what makes the show worth watching. Sometimes discussions around the show don’t even use hashtags—it’s culturally ubiquitous enough that even using one of the contestant’s names draws in the show’s online audience like bees to honey. We root for our favorite characters, we vote for who should stay and who should leave, we watch couples grow in love and/or descend into chaos. For the contestants, the prize at the end is instant (internet) fame and a budding influencer career. But for the audience, it’s the reward of satisfied boredom, romantic daydreaming and the joys of participating in a collective, shared experience. In a lot of ways, Love Island brings us closer to each other and to ourselves. Just like summer does.

But I can’t remember last year’s.

The show nor the summer. Bits and pieces of the days of last summer float around my mind—at some point I went to the beach, spent time with friends, learned new things—but I don’t have a cohesive memory of how the whole thing went. Even the pieces that remain are mostly only accessible to me if I jog my memory by looking at photos of myself from that time, and even then it only causes more disconnection; I barely recognize the face looking back at me in some of those photos. I barely remember being the girl who wore the clothes she wore or stood next to the people she was with. Most evidence of last summer feels like paraphernalia of a canceled TV show that I should remember watching but don’t.

So I don’t watch. I spend time avoiding looking at photos from this time last year because the work of trying to identify myself, my soul in my eyes, is too great to bear and would pull me away from the opportunity to make new, better memories now. Ones I will remember with ease this time next year.

But alas, Love Island is back. If there’s one thing that show will do, contrary to popular belief, it’s provoke thought. With the arrival of a new season, one can’t help but ponder about the new drama on the way and reminisce about last season. With a show inextricably linked to a time of year, this means more than remembering episodes: reminiscing about the last season of Love Island means thinking about last summer, and where you were in life during that time.

As a dedicated UK watcher, these thoughts have been on hold for me for the past week while the new season of Love Island US rolled out. I waited patiently, looking at out-of-context tweets about the contestants and building in excitement as viewers began to draw lines in the sand around their favorites, arguing viciously online already. Ah, the sweet joys of the villa.

But yesterday, a warm, rainy Monday in June, I remembered something. It was supposed to be the kickoff of Love Island UK. Lying in bed debating reading from a book that will expand my worldview or watching something from the endless streaming genre of “interesting enough to fall asleep to but not interesting enough to keep me awake,” this revelation truly felt like a gift from the heavens. A new episode of my favorite freaks with funny accents was exactly what I needed.

So I began the search. What season are we even on again? What platform does it come on? Do I need to get another VPN?

These questions weren’t out of the ordinary for me, since the seasons are a year apart and once the show ends it kind of starts to feel like a fever dream that you forget about until the following year. But I realized I was especially lost after I went to search for this year’s season and saw results calling it season 12. Okay, so that’s what number we’re on. I then typed ‘season 11’ into the search bar, just to confirm and to refresh my memory with the winners of last year’s season, only to see photos of people I didn’t recognize at all.

It was a bit surreal—I stared at the Google Images page for a while, studying each white face and the classic token black contestants, wondering why they weren’t sparking any memories for me. It was obvious by this point that I had never seen their faces on my screen before, but I couldn’t understand why; why hadn’t I watched last year’s season? It felt like I’d slipped a coin into the vending machine of my brain, but it was refusing to spit anything out. It owed me these memories, but it was telling me there were none to be found.

If a summer went by without me watching a season of Love Island, was I even alive?

Dramatic, sure, but it was the question on my mind. It wasn’t just that I couldn’t remember the season—my mind completely skipped the reality of it. When I looked up season 10, I fully remembered the cast. They were the last ones I remembered watching, so in my mind that cast was the most recent season. How did I get away with not only missing season 11, but completely avoiding anyone else talking about it? I couldn’t recall seeing posts, hearing about it from anyone else, nothing.

I missed out on the individual and the communal experience. Because I was not among last year’s Love Island UK watchers, last year’s Love Island UK may as well have not occurred. It’s funny how reality works that way, how it requires your participation to exist.

Last summer I participated in a reality beyond the understanding of anyone around me, which kept me away from Love Island and most friends and experiences that would remain in my memory. I do wonder if the things I missed out on even noticed my absence. Did Love Island miss me?

Did anyone?

Even these words as I write them feel like a cry for something—not for help, but for answers to a question I’m unable to form. I realized I missed last year’s Love Island, and that information felt like it needed to be delivered in an essay or even splattered across every billboard in Brooklyn. AISHAMANNE MISSED LOVE ISLAND LAST YEAR. I expect to be met with gasps and clutched pearls. The same way I wondered how it was possible, I expect others to wonder how we could’ve allowed this to happen: how did Aishamanne dip so easily out of this shared timeline? Where did she go?

But of course, most people would probably just shrug. You didn’t watch one season of a reality TV show. Cool.

The question I really want to ask, however, is not why I didn’t watch the show, but what else is missing? What other cultural experiences did I not only miss out on, but completely forget were important to me? In what other ways did I disappear?

This great 2024 disappearance of mine exists as a blessing and a curse. Sure, I missed things, but now I have two whole new seasons of Love Island to watch—this year’s and last year’s. Playing catch up just means getting to experience old things in a new way. Playing catch up means that I’m here to play—alive, in the game, able to be seen.

I don’t know who saw me last year and who didn’t. I don’t know all that I don’t remember. But I know what I do.

When I wasn’t watching Love Island last year, I was somewhere. Else. I existed. It was more real to me than anything ever has been. So I might have been “disconnected” from reality, struggling to find my way back to sanity away from the public eye until I could be okay again, but I had discovered in the meantime a reality of my own.

That’s the blessing. I traveled to a place no one else could see. I have memories of it, vividly gorgeous memories, and no one else was there to witness them. This doesn’t make them lonely, it makes them private. Sacred—not even I could photograph them. The world, and Love Island, missed out on that as much as I did on everything else.

I cried and cried and cried after I saw the Google search results of season 11. I cried as if I had just discovered the news of my own death. I cried as if I was watching the world move on without me. I cried because no one said anything—no one said that season ever happened, no one said Aisha’s not here, no one said here’s what you missed while you were gone. I cried because this realization is one that I knew no one would understand.

I cried even more when I went to get my nose re-pierced a few days ago. It was just about the anniversary of when it fell out last year, the beginning of all that went wrong. Walking around without a nose piercing for the past year has made me feel incomplete—again, in a way no one else would notice, which also added to my sadness. But losing my nose ring had simultaneously been one of the more comforting things from last year; it was physical evidence of violence and struggle. It was proof of pain. Proof of loss. Proof of my absence, from the world and from myself and from even my own face.

My piercer told me, after my crying and groaning, that she wasn’t surprised it hurt so much more for me this time than last time. “When you re-pierce tissue that’s already been scarred,” she said, “it’s harder so it hurts even more.”

It’s funny that now that I have a nose ring again, it’s more proof of pain. Pain that only lasted a couple seconds, and only caused me to cry because your nose is connected to your tear ducts (I’m a G), but pain nonetheless. My tattoos are also proof of pain, as is my smile and every pore on my skin.

This new nose ring is proof that I’m back.

Even if no one noticed I (nor the nose ring) was gone, I’ve returned. And every small way I return to myself, from piercings to Love Island to solo thrift store trips, carries personal sentiment that I couldn’t give language if I wanted to—or maybe I’m just beginning to now. Part of me wanted to let the piercer know the significance of that moment for me, but I decided against it. Too much to explain, and she probably couldn’t care less. Piercings mean something to everybody; who am I to say this was more special than a “regular” one? Lately, part of me wants to say something every time I encounter these moments that remind me of my recent past. But why remark on a past with no witnesses? It feels useless to celebrate regaining something no one knew you’d lost, so I’ve been opting for pretending those things never left and harboring my small bursts of pride in discretion.

Last year felt like a series of unfortunate events, moment after moment of private darkness. This year feels like I’m learning to walk in Aishamanne’s shoes again. So if you happen to notice me doing something extremely normal and getting a bit wistful, just remember that the last time I was able to do it, I was a completely different version of myself. Just remember that I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to get normalcy back.

For now, I’m creating it anew. For now, every little thing means the world to me. For now, when I get in bed at night after a long day of work and hop onto Hulu to welcome myself back to the Love Island villa, just know I’m welcoming myself back home.

Back like I never left.