When I learned to cry on command.
(PHOTO: Converse All-Stars via nmy)
Teenager-ism is a juggernaut, an age to explore weird boulevards unto oneself, to capture and create an expressive first draft-identity; to light the half-wild fuse and see what happens next.
It was early in the morning on my thirteenth birthday. Moments after waking, I tripped and smashed a plate glass mirror into jagged, dire, deathly pieces. It was my first day as a teenager and I wholeheartedly believed that the broken mirror would overthrow my pre-written future. Doom-full and bleak, I thought that it would somehow put a knife into my well-ordered plans.
Neurotic beyond superstition, I crept shift-eyed through the first few days under the albatross of an imaginary black shadow. Expecting rain clouds all the time, I began wearily accepting my ‘bad luck’ anti-destiny, and made purposeful efforts to embrace what I considered ‘everything.’
With fireworks, confrontational creativity, teenage angst enough to kill rock stars and a dangerous understanding of politics as theater, existential literature, French cinema and the Velvet Underground, I roared through my teenage years and rapidly became my modern self. Whether or not the curse of the broken mirror held tangible effects over my teenager-ism, I remember that seven-year misadventure as near-perfect in its intensity.
On April 29th, 2003, at 11:59pm, seven years later, when I was blind seconds away from being transformed into an entirely new post-teenage human being, I couldn’t help but just burst into tears. Turning twenty, I was terrified that my teenager-ism would finally disappear.
But it didn’t.
Today, I play my records too-loud, and wait for the gumshoe cops to knock. I’ll quote Baudelaire to the illiterate, smash a bottle for dramatic effect. I smoke cigarettes to look cool, and I drink my rum straight. When I grab a guitar I strum ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night?’ by default, and I’ll seduce your girlfriend for kicks by reading Pablo Neruda poems over the telephone.
At twenty-six, I’m still a teenager at heart.
