(no subject)
The summer after my last semester of high school could have been characterized by its first few lonely nights-houses belonging to people I knew only by association, dwindling drinks held lazily by manicured hands, pushing the hair out of my eyes as I spoke of music and politics and oh my god we graduated. We were kids, on top of the world, determined to grow up too fast and cry ourselves to sleep later over years lost. Memories forgotten. We should have known better. We did know better, we just didn’t want to.
I would be driven home by a different casual acquaintance every night, carrying the same dry conversation in a bucket: how was your night? Good? Fun. Thanks so much for the ride, really, you’re a lifesaver. Musing about months from now when we wouldn’t need to sneak back into our own houses, when we could just walk down the hall to our own dorm room, crash on a bed the size of an 8-year-old’s. Pretending that would make these sorts of nights so much more sophisticated.
My parents must have known what was going on. They must have, just been silenced by their own denial. She’s just tired, they thought, growing pains. That’s just how kids are. She comes home at four every morning and sleeps until five the next afternoon. Wakes up with a headache and a craving for ice cream, oh, how much she’s grown. I must have come downstairs looking like the morning after the night before, with too much eyeliner and last night’s breath-concealing gum now stale in my mouth. I would give them one-word answers and heavily slurred requests for Tylenol, and they must have known.
I cringe at the amount of people that must have seen me in that state, giggling and sauntering around parties like I owned the place (which, in some cases, I did), kissing boys on couches and denying being under the influence until the end of the world. Admitting the next morning that I didn’t even remember entire conversations…
And yet it continued, this illusion of substance, this empty waste of time we called youth. We blamed it on age, on feigned ignorance, on the influence of the media and peer pressure but it was us. It was all us, always us. We knew exactly what we were doing, what we were getting ourselves into. It was just a matter of who was to become the example.
And we thanked God, or lucky stars, or whatever we had and believed every time we survived another blurry car ride behind the wheel, every time we stumbled through another awkward conversation with our parents, every time we talked our way out of trouble, again and again. We should have known it was only a matter of time. We knew.
I would be driven home by a different casual acquaintance every night, carrying the same dry conversation in a bucket: how was your night? Good? Fun. Thanks so much for the ride, really, you’re a lifesaver. Musing about months from now when we wouldn’t need to sneak back into our own houses, when we could just walk down the hall to our own dorm room, crash on a bed the size of an 8-year-old’s. Pretending that would make these sorts of nights so much more sophisticated.
My parents must have known what was going on. They must have, just been silenced by their own denial. She’s just tired, they thought, growing pains. That’s just how kids are. She comes home at four every morning and sleeps until five the next afternoon. Wakes up with a headache and a craving for ice cream, oh, how much she’s grown. I must have come downstairs looking like the morning after the night before, with too much eyeliner and last night’s breath-concealing gum now stale in my mouth. I would give them one-word answers and heavily slurred requests for Tylenol, and they must have known.
I cringe at the amount of people that must have seen me in that state, giggling and sauntering around parties like I owned the place (which, in some cases, I did), kissing boys on couches and denying being under the influence until the end of the world. Admitting the next morning that I didn’t even remember entire conversations…
And yet it continued, this illusion of substance, this empty waste of time we called youth. We blamed it on age, on feigned ignorance, on the influence of the media and peer pressure but it was us. It was all us, always us. We knew exactly what we were doing, what we were getting ourselves into. It was just a matter of who was to become the example.
And we thanked God, or lucky stars, or whatever we had and believed every time we survived another blurry car ride behind the wheel, every time we stumbled through another awkward conversation with our parents, every time we talked our way out of trouble, again and again. We should have known it was only a matter of time. We knew.