A Eulogy, To One of the Only Things I Have Left From Back Then

When I was fifteen I was asked out by the captain of my high school’s football team.

I didn’t care much, didn’t kiss him even. Went red-faced nonetheless.

15 year old girls, we do things like this.

But I? I was in love.

My high school had a mezzanine in a library full of winding, yellowing dog-eared pages and the smell of text that’s lived longer than any of us within it. Who can honestly say that they don’t love that smell, want to suck it up into a jar and wear it every day, the smell of knowledge so much older and greater than oneself?

I couldn’t keep it then, and I can’t now. So I went there (every day), sat there, and put on Definitely Maybe. I still, some days, wish I had it in a bottle somewhere.

I still, some days, wish I had the sandwiches my mother lovingly made me that back then were carelessly, terribly thrown into garbage bins prior to entering that place.

15 year old girls, we do things like this. Was there any part of my head that wasn’t, in some way or another, sad and sick?

Probably not, but someone, something, else loved me anyways.

And so I put on my headphones, and put on Definitely Maybe.

Supersonic. That solo. Blew my mind and gave me heaven. Every. Single. Fucking Time. Fifteen years old, no place to go. It gave me everywhere to go then (and still, now).

Then, when I was nineteen, there was D’You Know What I Mean. Taking me through 06:17 train rides, had me standing purposeful and thin and in a black pea coat that looked exactly as I meant it to, as I wanted it to (and still, now).

She’s Electric when dancing in my childhood home’s backyard, in faded grey track shorts and frizzed out summer hair, reflecting Californian sun for the first time, electric under my skin and swinging a little white dog, dying, round ‘til neither of us could take another breath or breathe, breathe, breathe out and drown in the staccato joy of strums and sound.

Hey Now! was highway car trips through West Virginian mountains and Carolinian plains that had alligators in their ditches. Scared us all.

Morning Glory, and I’m calling home from neon sign lit South Beach payphones on calling cards with my brother holding the receiver while I talk into it, afraid of the spit that others have left on it, afraid of anyone finding the three stale menthols I’ve hidden in a CD case in my motel room drawer, as if I lived there and had made a life there for the four night stay.

Some Might Say, my first driving test. I failed.

Listen Up in a car, driving home from early morning dreams in coffee shop windows, knowing that I really, really don’t mind being on my own and feeling it so deep throughout my bones when he sang it, too.

And I can’t say what it was about that album, those songs, that took me everywhere I needed to go in my head, but it did. It did at fifteen, and it did at every year I’ve been in between.

And now, at twenty four years old, it’s all over and, in another sense, just beginning.

I don’t feel like anyone could really ever understand what it is that I feel for those songs because, in a certain sense, they can’t. They’ll never hear the sunrises and being still drunk at work with Champagne Supernova, they’ll never feel the 3 a.m. Yonge Street walks alone of Cast No Shadow, or smell that library, full of sagacity and future, with the whole glorious fifty one minutes of Definitely Maybe.

And then one day, the makers, they’re gone. Like everything, every moment, every one of us in time.

That’s okay, though. That part of me is too.

But if I ever need to go back? They know, and I know, where to find me.

Us.

People sometimes forget that every beginning is an ending, too.

The change, the change...it all happened for a reason, didn't it?

I've made it. I'll keep it.

It's you, always.

The Sixteenth of July.

I’ve got offices to clear out and debts to call back and coffee change to be handed over to the ones who couldn’t for a second know what I mean about any of it (likewise, I can’t really bring myself to do any of it). To spend any more days, yet another day, with my legs at an appropriate 90 ninety degree angle while sitting and my fingers click-clack-clocking the time away on words just like these words and other words that mean even less than these words, it’s all so unbearably nothing sometimes, isn’t it? Nothing’s anything except pictures printed and pasted on my books of paper while on someone else’s dollar, and where are all of my morals now? The guilt hasn’t set in yet here and it’s been years. But oh, how these weeks sometimes fly.

So last night they watched from the step as I made my stumbling stop carrying bags of dryer sheets and cheap wine, and I expect they saw through the untruths that even now I don’t regret telling. Sometimes the change came fast and sometimes the change comes slow but most certainly of all we must, absolutely must at this point know that it’s going to. It’s going to happen to all of us. Unspoken but not unacknowledged, the awkwardness won’t really go away and baby I’m just a fool tearing all my heart out just for you.

The documentarian to it all, I consider that I may only do what I do because I want you to know that this was a time, is a time, when standing on dark July-hot pavement, covering wine-stain smiles and looking in each other’s eyes was all we had and all we needed. Refilling Evian bottles on broken headphone nights, tales of bike accidents and how someone else has ended up coming along for the ride. We need these moments like the sun needs love to shine itself upon in these recent glorious mornings.

So don’t count it out yet, go back to the drawing board and searching for your replacements as I’ve heard you’ve done so many times in your many moves around these streets that are so much smaller than they first appear. Don’t count me out yet, but when there comes a time that it’s the only thing left to do, just know that I’ve saved all of these words for you.

24 and there's so much more.

Turning 24 this past Saturday was challenging and eye-opening to say the least.

Aside from 'the problems', I've virtually always considered birthdays to be more depressing than celebratory. I don't care much for the notion of a day on which all of the attention is focused on me, and instead the day on which I was born tends to bring a sense of my own mortality much closer to the forefront of my mind than it generally is...which is saying a lot, as I'm often fixated with it to begin with.

24 has always struck me as the age at which I'm meant to really, actually, truly, wholeheartedly grow up. Which, in essence, means setting the vast majority of my neuroses aside once and for all and becoming that confident, strong, take-no-prisoners kind of woman I've aspired to be for as long as I can remember. 24 is, in my mind, when I'm supposed to legitimately become a 'woman' for that matter (I don't know about you, but I certainly haven't considered myself to be one yet - Girl, maybe? Chick, definitely. Woman...yeah, not a chance).

When I awoke on the 27th of June I begun weaving this tangled mess inside my own head, effectively psyching myself out before the day had even brought me to my feet. Typical me.

But the universe often has a funny way of reminding us of those things we've forgotten, those conversations, images and thoughts which have been stored in the deep recesses of some convoluted memory bank, just waiting for the time and place at which it somehow knew there would be relevance to the seemingly irrelevant, all of which didn't strike you as at all worthwhile at the time.

Flipping through an old issue of Harper's Bazaar I noticed two images, both of which I'd discussed with my mother while we were getting pedicures a few months ago. They are as follows:

Daisy Lowe, in a [fantastic] Meisel editorial. Gwyneth Paltrow, in a Tod's advert.

There was little debate between us as to the physical attractiveness of either, as they're both, quite obviously, beautiful (in these specific photos at the very least). And so the topic of our argument was not who looked better, but rather concerned a certain taste level.

My generally adversarial nature aside, I ascertained that it was, in fact, Daisy who looked cooler, better, more awesome and so on and so forth. My mother, naturally, proposed the opposite. "What's so uncool about having clean hair and nice skin and not looking strung-out?" she asked me, to which I of course responded with "it's boring" or something equally dumb-sounding and ignorant. We continued to prattle on and on about this until the people scrubbing our feet were surely dead bored with listening to us, our polish had dried and we sauntered out of the salon - me slightly more defensive and pissed off, and her slightly more concerned about my general aspirations in life.

This was, of course, all swept under the rug by the time we reached the nearest Starbucks...god, I must sound like an insufferable yuppie right now, what with all this talk of pedicures and Starbucks....but I digress. On the morning of June 27th I came across these images again, and perhaps for the first time ever, I saw what my mother had seen.

At 24 years old I finally want to start being good to myself.

It's not that I have to grow up, it's that I actually, legitimately, whole-fucking-heartedly want to. I don't want to be a nail-biter, I don't want to have dark circles around my eyes, I don't want to eat shit food and then starve myself for a week, I don't want legs that are pale and bruised, I don't want to play silly games with dudes that I know are all wrong for me but go out with anyways. I don't want to, I don't want to, I DO NOT want this.

Starving artists are so goddamn romanticized, and at last I really do see that there's nothing romantic about it. I can safely state that, from my experience of being one and knowing many, it doesn't produce better art. It does, however, succeed in making you miserable and perpetually dissatisfied. And ugly. And, chances are, age rapidly (and I am nothing if not admittedly vain). It also grants you a free pass to make terribly bad decisions. Of which I've made many.

And so it goes. On the birthday that was chalked up to be one of the most depressing yet, I didn't get a party, but a what currently feels like a radiant, shiny new lease on life.

At 24 years old I'm going to embrace the inner Gwyneth, be my own best friend and listen to that little voice inside of my head that knew I would get here all along.

P.S. If it's been implied that I plan on turning into a pretentious, condescending, prissy bitch who never has any fun, I apologize for the lack of clarity on my end. It simply means the end of total wasterdom, and the beginning of this wonderful thing called self-care.