Drink your juice.

When I was sixteen years old I had the biggest crush on an older guy who lived about an hour away from my hometown. It was the dawn of the flip phone, and he’d call me at night before bed to talk about our respective days and what we thought about albums we’d told each other to download and the kind of people we were going to be once our lives took off.

One day on a whim he drove down to see me with no real plan, and I gave him a tour of my tiny life and the Glass House and took him to a deli where he didn’t order anything and they burned my bagel and we sat in my ‘93 Toyota Camry listening to Bright Eyes and building and building and building off of jokes.

The town park used to be an estate that belonged to the founder of an oil company, and it has an old stone house at the top of a hill that used to hold so many Great Gatsby-era plotlines, but now it gets used for post-prom parties and wedding receptions, and I took him there because where else do you go when you’re sixteen. And we walked the trails in the woods and tiptoed around the banks of a pond to retrieve a kid’s stranded mitten and we hung it on a low-hanging branch so that the kid could find it whenever he came back.

And I remember walking, that day, and being the kind of nervous you are when there’s so much good momentum and the world is proving to you that it can be better than the things you write for yourself in your resting brain, and tripping over my Birk clogs and blushing a little but laughing more and the steam from my breath in the air while I pontificated about suburbia and the world and what kind of woman I wanted to be.

And I miss me, a little. Not that I think I was smarter then, but I was more distilled somehow. Less moderate, less scared. More sure that my feeling something was enough to make it correct and true, but also a little paralyzed by everything. At that precipice of real, good things with a loud, adult brain, but still not quite able to move yet. Baby bird with the wrong kind of feathers.

Anyway, he wrote to me recently. A couple of messages just checking in and saying hi, and he asked me, “Is it still cool to like Bright Eyes?” as a joke-y signoff, but I gave a real reply.

Cause fuck if I ever think I’m better than things that felt huge when they were.

And yeah, I’m not sitting down with this music now, and it doesn’t resonate at all the way it did, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t love it or it won’t always be a signifier for me or that I won’t always want to be near to the person I was when I loved it.

Won’t want to wear her like a pin on a lapel and not give too many fucks about whether or not that makes me average.