It's crazy what music can do to you. A Train song popped into my head earlier tonight, and I've been on YouTube, Vevo, and Metacafe all night as a result, looking up stuff from when I was 15-22 years old, songs that I haven't listened to in forever. As a result, my Facebook is flooded with links. But I don't mind.
I close my eyes and let the songs wash over me, Eve 6, Our Lady Peace, the Cranberries, etc. My body thins out, my hair lengthens, my chest shrinks, and my skin clears up a bit. The makeup shifts to silver eyeshadow and brown eyeliner, and the glasses vanish. I can taste Boone's Farm at the back of my throat, and I'm walking at night in the middle of nowhere, thinking of all the things I thought of back then. I can feel the heavy humid air of a Lake Michigan beach on my skin, and I know if I open my eyes and look down, my legs will be tanned, my toenails will be unpainted, and the frayed hems of a pair of cutoffs will hang pale against thighs browned from repeated sun exposure. My vision will be better.
In my memory, I walk across cool wet sand, and a lake laps at my toes...Sturgeon Bay? Little Traverse Bay? Duke Lake? Mullett Lake? I'm not sure. The moon is out, and there's silver streaking across the water, reaching for me, and part of me wants to chase it. Instead, I walk and think. I sit on the sand and light a cigarette, and people I miss move through my mind...Budz and J from high school, two of the few people I trusted enough to see me, who I was, not the depressed angsty poet front I tried so hard to put up. I hear the songs, "Think Twice" starts playing, and I feel this crushing need to have someone be like that with me, just once, just so I could know how it felt to be wanted so desperately that someone would fight for me like that. Not the center of someone's universe, but close to it. I can almost imagine myself as one of those girls, taller, thinner, bigger boobs, flatter ass, thinner legs, perfectly clear skin and blue eyes.
The music ends, and I snap back into my present day self, shaggy haired, pierced nose, purple-painted toenails and eyelids, tattooed, a little heavier, a little more cynical, and a lot wiser. Thankful I'm not a cookie-cutter video girl. Maybe I'm not model material, but I'm happy with what I've got, hazel eyes and good cheekbones, thick hair and eyelashes, skin that tans easily and a few dark brown black Irish freckles for decoration. Maybe life is more exciting for the unexceptional-looking girls - we can do more than the girls who have attention constantly focused on them for their looks. I can promise you that if I were standing next to some six foot tall blonde bombshell with double-D tits, you're gonna be focused on her rather than on the short girl with the red-brown hair and gauged ears, and while you're staring, I'm assessing you. It lets me stay one step ahead. I move quick because I have to to keep up. I rely on my brains because I can't on my looks. And when I sense someone's interested in how I look, I hide behind my glasses, profanity, and tendency toward snark. It's self defense coming from someone who doesn't know what else to do.
I talk to someone who was one of my dearest friends from my high school days, and it's always a little weird for me. We'd fallen out of touch for years. Then, out of the blue, I get an email, a reply to some stupid random forward I'd sent him months prior. We emailed and talked on the phone for six months before he came to visit family and we went to hang out. It was so disconcerting to walk into the bar and see him...I didn't realize until that moment that every time we'd talked on the phone, in my head, I was a freshman in high school again, with all the physical differences between me then and me now seeming like they just weren't there. So when I moved toward him, making sure that was really him - he looked different too - I glanced down for a minute and blinked rapidly, wondering where my oversized belly had gone, why was there no greasy peroxided hair hanging in my face, where did I learn to walk with this confidence like I was a queen...without realizing it, I'd adopted my cocky kitchen strut, the one I use at work to let new co-workers know I know what I'm doing, that I'm confident in my ability. I snapped back to the present, to who I was now, mother, cook excellente, moderate badass at life, until his arms went around me, and then, shit, I'm fourteen again.
Music and friends, they can take you back and transport you to different times in your life if you'll let them. Me, I always do. I enjoy the ride, especially when I've been having a rough week, or a whole month filled with failure like this past one has been. I take a ride back in time, and it reminds me how far I've come, and that if I could come this far, I can go farther still.
So, dear friend of mine, who made me promise never to publish his name on my blog, thank you. You frustrate the shit out of me on occasion with the way you fall out of touch, but only for a second, till I remember that the only person who never lets me down is me, and that you always get back in touch again at some point. The randomness adds a bit of zest to the routine of daily life, which is cool, and it's always good hanging up the phone with you, stretching my limbs out from whatever cramped position I've been sitting in, and realizing that no matter how much I've changed in the last fifteen years, there must still be some good left in me, otherwise we wouldn't still be talking. Love ya, man.
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