Yesterday, Haley blogged about driving down by the lake. " didnt ask anyone, or even tell anyone i went. but it was just what my heart needed," she wrote. "i turned the radio off, and drove slow so i could just look at it. it was seriously what i needed right then. hopefully i don't get in trouble for going without asking. aaaand yeah. i hope i can make peace with all of my troubles."
Oh, my.
Those pervasive adolescent heartaches. I remember. I talk to her a little bit about my teenagehood but not all of the stories. I don't want to glorify the mistakes I made. I don't want it to seem wild and romantic and edgy. I don't want it to be tempting. Because I don't want her, or any of my kids, to feel what I felt. So I have worked hard to (hopefully) keep them away from the wild and romantic and edgy stuff.
But I can't keep them away from heartache. It finds you. All of your life, it is always a possibility. It's fairly intense when you're a teenager of course. It feels more magnified somehow. Maybe because you don't have the perspective yet of old sorrows and new ones.
That is not me downplaying how she feels. It is me acknowledging it, which I think is important for teenagers to know. The way you feel is the way you feel. Someone telling you to stop feeling it or, worse, that you don't deserve to feel that way, you haven't earned your heartache, because it could be so much worse or he wasn't dating you then or it's not like you're my only friend or any of the other reasons people offer—all that does is make you doubt what you feel. You have to move through it to move past it. You can't just skip it.
And what she might not know is that while I would rather she just tell me where she's going, I understand it, too. She has a cell phone so I could still track her down, and being somewhere no one knows is part of it. Part of the way that just driving makes you feel better. She doesn't know that I wouldn't get upset because this is a story I don't think I ever told her.
When I was at my worst teenage phase, I would get up every morning. I would get ready for school and then leave in my car. I would actually drive to the high school. I would pull into the parking lot. And then I would just sit there. Getting out of my car and walking into that building? The thing I couldn't do. I couldn't sit at a desk with books spread open before me, learning stuff like geography or history or a squared + b squared = C squared or all the other stuff that seemed so completely useless because it wasn't teaching me what I really needed to know, which was what do I do with all of this? I couldn't sit there with all of them, pretending I was OK, and ignoring all the "that girl is weird" under-the-breath muttered comments, and managing to act normal like everyone else.
So I'd leave the parking lot. I'd go to 7-11 and with the change I'd scrounged up from my mother's purse or my sisters' pockets or maybe under the couch, buy a large coffee and put three Irish Creme creamers in it and five ice cubes to cool it down. I'd put five dollars of gas in the tank using the gas card I stole from my dad. And then I'd drive. I'd drive anywhere, aimless. Crying and singing along to the boom box on the seat next to me. (A.M. radio, remember?) I'd drive past the enormous houses of the wealthy on the east side. And I would always end up in the mountains.
No one knew where I was. My mom assumed I was at school. My teachers had forgotten I existed and my friends were busy justifying themselves or suffering in their own way. There was something to that—to knowing that no one knew where I was. It was like disappearing, somehow. And everything hurt less because I didn't really exist if no one knew where I was.
When it was time for school to be over, I'd drive home. I could manage (sort of) the pretending-to-be-normal thing when I was at home. I'd pretend to do homework when really I was writing poetry or angry diatribes. I'd answer the phone when the automated call from the high school came, keeping my mom from knowing I'd sluffed again.
And then I'd do the same thing the next day.
None of this was noble or good of me. Or good for me, maybe. Except—the driving. The aimless wandering. The movement towards the mountains, where I'd park and sit on my hood and feel, just for a minute, finally a white peace.
So no. I'm not upset. I totally understand. I understand the need to drive along peaceful landscapes in order to move through what is painful.
I get it.
The Police: A Concert Review of Sorts
This summer marks the 20-year anniversary of my friend Chris and I meeting. Something far larger than me made sure we were in the same group at our telemarketing jobs, and we became instant friends—kindred spirits, you might say. She was one of my adolescent years’ biggest blessings; it is hard to explain what she means to me. Like no one else in my group of high-school friends, she had my back. She knew me and loved me and even took care of me when I was at my most unlovable phase. She is the keeper of all my past secrets. But we don’t get to see each other enough, now that we’re all grown up. So when the chance came up—even though I felt guilty about leaving my kids for the night—I went to The Police concert with her.
And I am so glad I did.
Because going to a concert like that reminds me of how it felt to be my old self. The scents of beer, cigarette smoke, bodies, warm grass, surrounded by pieces of conversation and laughter, and then the music: a sensory time-machine that made me remember things I forgot I had forgotten. I kept thinking that everyone else should be there, not just me and Chris, but all the friends I had sloughed off of me through processes of betrayal and back-stabbing. In between the opening act (Elvis Costello, who did a cool version of "Allison" with Sting himself) and the main event, we set off to find the bathrooms but instead actually did discover an old friend, Jennifer. If Chris is the keeper of my old secrets, then Jenn is the keeper of my hardest self. During our senior year Jenn and I were always together (Chris was working in Maryland as a nanny then), rebellious and angry and stupid. I made many life-changing decisions that year, and the Amy Jenn knew was almost nothing like the Amy I am now.
Jenn and I both nearly cried when we saw each other. Maybe we both felt the same way: that the other held memories that almost no one else does. What I wanted the reunion to feel like was equal, three old friends comparing life stories. A scene from a book. Instead I felt vaguely ashamed of my current existence, the smallness of a small-town librarian and mother. What happened to all that fiery ambition we both used to have? She’d done something with hers (ad-agency employee approving press passes and doing other glamorous things), but it was hard to confess I still haven’t managed to accomplish much. Plus, she’s still rail-thin (she always was) while I am...well, not.
After Chris and I said good-bye to Jenn (with promises of keeping in touch) and finally made it to the bathroom, I found myself thinking about that Amy I used to be, the one whose environment was founded in rebellion-as-religion. My greatest contempt was for people who seemed to be pretending. (Still is, really.) And yet, standing there surrounded by ghosts, dancing a bit to "Message in a Bottle," I wondered: when was I pretending? Was my down-with-church, vodka-drinking self who I really am? Or is it the person I am now, trying to live my religion and be a good mother, feeling guilty over not achieving housewifery-goddesshood? They are two nearly black-and-white different versions of myself, and I’m not sure which is the authentic one.
But what I did decide: I wasn’t ever pretending when it came to music. That is the truest face of my goth-girl incarnation, loving good music. How many concerts have Chris and I gone to together? Erasure and Boingo and Depeche Mode and INXS and Book of Love. Jenn and I, too: PIL, Peter Murphy, Ministry at the Speedway Café. I still listen to a ton of the same music I listened to at 17, or to musicians who were influenced by those bands. It wasn’t until the first encore, though, that I remembered just exactly what I loved most about The Police: their song "King of Pain." When they played it, another mini time-travel machine shoved me back to my despondent adolescent nights, when my soul really did feel like a black spot caught up there. It is good, despite my unsurity of authenticity, to no longer feel that black despair.
Twenty years ago, when Chris and I went to see Erasure together, going to a concert wasn’t just about the music. It was also about keeping an eye out for spottings of The Boy (the one you loved beyond reason or hope), or perhaps even sitting with him for a few minutes and feeling that never-to-be-repeated feeling of pure, hormone-edged adoration; about illegal substances snuck into the concert in the hidden inner pockets of leather jackets; about wild abandon. Now, of course, it’s about hanging out with old friends and telling yourself you deserve an evening away, worrying about traffic afterwards, checking the cell phone for missed calls from the kids. And about old friendships themselves, how they carry that unseen bundle of memory and old selves. How they matter as much because of the past as of the present. But it’s still about the music, how it weaves, somehow, around nearly every one of those old memories and old selves. Along with Chris, it was music I took with me from that Amy version, and I am glad to have both.
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