It Tasted Like Disappointment (One Minute Memoir)

A Memoir on Letting Nostalgia Go Cold

Setting: Summer 2025 — Sunday lunch in the car, chasing nostalgia through a drive-through window

I missed the McDonald’s Snack Wraps. They were a cult classic. I don’t like burgers, so they were always my fallback: tasty, cheap, solid, mine.

So when they finally announced they were coming back, I planned for it like it mattered. Sunday lunch. I thought about it all day Saturday. I could almost taste it.

I ordered my usual: Diet Coke. Fries. Ranch Snack Wrap.

I unwrapped it in the car, ready. Fries first. Then the bite I’d been waiting for. It was… rubbery. Not the crispy chicken tenders they used to have. The cheese wasn’t melted. The tortilla was stiff. The whole thing was cold in all the wrong ways.

It tasted like disappointment. Not nostalgia.

I didn’t even finish it.

Years ago, when they discontinued orange Hi-C, I took it personally. I wrote a whole email to the company... not a complaint, but a case. Thought-out, persuasive, sincere. Because some things matter more than they probably should. And I really, really wanted them to bring it back. And when they finally did? It was everything I remembered: delicious, refreshing, full of memory and joy.

But the Snack Wrap? That one broke the spell. It came back different. Or maybe I did.

Not everything from the past deserves to be resurrected. Some things belong to who we were, not who we are now.

Sometimes, what we miss isn’t the thing itself, but the time it came from. The feeling. The version of us who found comfort in it. We reach back for the comfort. But sometimes, it only ever lived in the before.

Still, there's something hopeful in knowing we can miss what was and still be okay with what is.

This post is part of my One-Minute Memoir series — short reflections on small moments that still manage to say something big.