If I Knew Then What I Know Now... Preachings of a Twenty-Something: Version 2.0

There's something about music that ties me to every major events/season/moment/feeling, of my life. Two nights ago, I realized that one of my childhood best friends and I have tickets to a Dashboard Confessional show in Lowell, MA next week. In preparation, I promptly opened iTunes, and clicked on the 'Dusk & Summer' album -- by far, my favorite of Dashboard/Chris Carrabba's work. I've lost count of how many times I've seen them since my days as a freshman in high school. I'm well into double digits, and every time I see them, I love it. The concerts go on like a sing-along, and Chris is not too bad on the eyes.

While listening the other night, however, I realized that I had stopped listening to them for a good year and a half. Completely stopped. Like cold turkey quitting - which we know I'm incapable of for any other vice in my life. And then, in this weird, nostalgic instant, I got brought back to two summers ago -- and remembered why I stopped listening to them. I remembered bus rides out to Amherst. Hot, sticky summer Saturday afternoons, walking downtown with my then-boyfriend. Ice cream outings at Bart's in downtown Amherst, MA. I remembered feeling the happiest that I had in a very, very long time, and thinking, 'This is it. This is my life. This is what I want my life to be. With these people and these places and these things.' This album is the soundtrack to that summer, and to those feelings. Although happy, it hits me that I'll never feel exactly like that again. I'll never have those moments again.

Maybe I'm having a bit of another quarter-life crisis that P wrote about a few weeks ago in a blog post. Maybe it's me having too little to do when I'm not slaving away in my corporate America office world. But I find myself rethinking my life -- and not in the way that I'm questioning past hairstyles and fashion choices (but for the record, I take full, guilty ownership of the short haircut of 2006). I think that I'll never again be able to relive the summer that I reminise about. If I knew everything that would happen after that summer, I wonder if I would have ever let myself be that happy in the first place. I guess everything looks as clear as a Swarovski crystal in hindsight, but it's all so much more complex than that. Regardless, I'll never have those conversations with the same people -- if any conversations at all. I think it's the finality of never that irks me. Never scares me more than forever (although I'm flat-out not a woman of extremes). I will never again live at home with my parents. Never be a little girl playing on the swing set, wearing a pink dress, my hair in pigtails and patent leather mary-janes. I'll never again go to senior prom, or be on a varsity sport team. I'll never again swipe my student id at my favorite cafe on campus at UMass, never again go to a fraternity party (although that's probably for the better). Never again see a new millenium be brought in on January 1st. Never again graduate from college. Never. Never. Never.

Is this what my dad told me when he said that things change after college? That things start to look different and feel different because you miss things that you never thought you would? Maybe this blog (and a post that started out being about Dashboard Confessional and oh-so-dreamy Chris Carrabba) isn't the proper soapbox for me to shout on, but oh well. This is growing up, and it feels weird and awkward and kind of sad. I want to be careless, irrational, and happy for the moment, in the moment. Life all of a sudden isn't about songs that make me want to daydream about my future ('Stolen' by Dashboard, for the record, if any of you all wanted to know my secret spacing out and thinking song). Now, life is planning my future -- living my future. And I feel unfulfilled and cheated by my past. It swept by without warning me that it was going to feel too fast. Can someone just give me one day as a five-year old again? I want to go back to schoolyard crushes, Play-Doh, and hoping for the day when my parents would let me wear nail polish and a boy would kiss me. Life was so simple then, and now it's filled with rent, voting, jobs, responsabilities, debt and drama. What the hell happened to me and the world in 18 years since my 5 year old days? Being 5 doesn't seem like that long ago, does it?
-M