and like, the thing that Strikes me about this so much isn’t that it goes away - like, yes, that knocks the air out of my lungs sometimes that teenagedom is a stage in your life that you inevitably leave behind, and you can never travel back to it because your teenagedoom now only exists in your memory. you can read the diary entries and listen to the music and look at the pictures and if you’re lucky, you saved as much of it as you could, filled the attic up with anecdotes, selfies, bad poetry, good poetry, home videos, train tickets, notes swapped in class that saved your life once, but the act of being in it is gone. some memories will linger more than others, and so the year becomes a constellation of a few sharp feelings and memories in the rearview mirror, until you can almost taste it. until 2016 blushes a bright red, an evening orange, a soft, sunflower yellow, hopeful and tender and unsure. simple as the first of everything that mattered. holy ground. 2013 is all hiding in the bathroom stalls and crawling home from school early again, an email in the middle of the night that changes everything, a note, a butterfly. 2018, the end of the world. 2017, the sky-high rejoicing, despairing to death, and you, floating in the middle, desperately grasping at both.
these things are behind you, but you can see them still - if you’re lucky, you have the records. maybe you filled enough diaries to piece it all back together, make sense of the chaos of it all, listen in on the conversations again, a visitor, a spy to the people you’ve been. maybe you held on to the songs, a handful of feelings that cut through you that year. maybe january 2018 is all how could i have known and alright by keaton henson, and later, the year sounds like soon soon by tom rosenthal and september is all welcome to new york by taylor swift and then all my heroes by bleachers.
maybe you did write a whole album about it. made it immortal. doesn’t matter how, but if you’re lucky, you really did build that giant teenage museum, so some version of it is preserved forever. look, this, all this is my teenagedom. this is what it looked like, how it tasted, how it ached and pulled and pushed and split me clean in half. this is how my hair felt and this is what i always had for breakfast and this was my favourite jumper. this is how we spent a summer. this was my handwriting. this is who i thought my parents were. this was the first of everything. this is the only picture i have from that night.
that doesn’t go away. is behind you, fades and changes and becomes something else in your memory as you yourself fade and change and, inevitably, become somebody else as well. still, it doesn’t go away - but once it’s in the rearview mirror, there isn’t any more of it.
this, this is all my teenagedom. this is all there is of it. this is how i spent these years. nothing else is ever going to happen to teenage me because the clock struck midnight and she stopped existing. this is everything those years were. all the people you imagined you might be at 17 when you were 14 are one finite person now. the year is finite. your sparkling, aching, messy, empty-bellied teenagedom is finite. nothing else is ever going to happen to it now. all the paths ahead of you slowly turn into the one that you chose, a singular, glorious, bumpy hike stretching out behind you as the years go on. time comes for your teenagedom first, then the next decade and the next, and there is no way to ever do it all, to ever live the lives of all the people you imagined, even briefly, you might become one day. the grand, sparkling mystery of your future has been solved. you have arrived, and you have unveiled all the secrets it ever kept from you.
the attics are stuffed to the brim with the things you’ve seen and lips you’ve tasted, all the songs you have ever heard and all the books you read and all the countries you ever lived in. this is what you did for your 22nd birthday. these are all the grand chances you took. this is the best job you ever had and this is the amount of years you had it. this is what it all did to you. this is where you’ve ended up. for every attic, there is a basement, filled to the top with all the things you didn’t do. for better or worse.
that. that’s the part that makes me lose my fucking mind. one day, the great and glittering chapters of your life will close, some gently, some violently, some too early. time inevitably runs out, and i want to spend it running around trying to fill it with so much of the sky-high rejoicing, despairing to death. there is so much comfort in not knowing what the future holds - but one day, i will have explored all the rooms i’ve built in this museum and everything i hung up here. hopefully, when have the answers, when i’ve found out what happens to me, when my teenagedom closes behind me - i will slip out the backdoor and look at it and say - oh, so this is what it became.
and i hope i’ll recognise it.
