Good evening. I am sitting at a table that is largely too small and low down for comfortable use located on the top floor of a Starbucks in a town just outside of my own, accompanied by my closest friend and procrastinating on my work. I was going through my saved Google passwords and found myself here. I made my account on here when I was 17 and was in a cringier place than I am today, but I remember being on here and writing down whatever banal thoughts came to my porous teenage mind. I read them now and reminisce, vomit in my mouth a little, and sit content knowing that to some extent I have never been an awful writer. I've told people about this litle corner of the Internet based on what I vaguely remembered about this place. I am very happy to find you all again.
There's something about being 17 that can't be replicated. Not a girl, not yet a woman. I was in love with a boy who I thought would stay with me forever, as is the standard. I worried about my future, but in lieu of rigorously trying to manipulate it as I do today i simply made the decisions that my life steered me towards. Good student? Go to university. Good baker? Keep making cupcakes for friends on birthdays. Good writer? Abandon any hope of profiting off of creative endeavors and pursue a career as a scientist (wait, what? Anyways...) My life was somehow carefree in that year in a way that was unusual even for my character. The thing about going with the flow is that life leads one to scenarios one can choose to take on impulse, even if unusual. Exploring abandoned buildings. Starting fires in a shopping cart in the stormwater drainage tunnel behind your highschool and running to Walmart to get s'mores supplies. Spending your days lying to your mom in daylight hours and doing dirtbag shit with your dirtbag friends after 5 PM. Going to your first small venue shows and realize that 30-somethings dance all corny because they truly don't care about what anyone thinks in a way you can only envy. Seventeen was the age in which I dipped my toes into the adult world without having to dive in. At some point, I was pushed and crashed into the water.
I am still that girl, but I buried her under the years of neuroticism, exploitative labor, and hard, adult choices. Every now and then I let myself be impulsive. Knowing it would take less time to take local transit to one of my favourite restaurants than to get home, I proceed there and share a meal with myself. I still understand that life's magic comes through experiences, though the magic doesn't quite hit my brain the way it used to. I still write with too many commas (but I'm working on it!). I still fall so thoroughly in love that I haven't let myself find it in the past three years in fear of giving it to someone who doesn't deserve it. And in a way I still let the winds of life blow me whichever way they choose to. Which is how I find myself here, typing this instead of reading research papers.
If you'll have me, I'll keep some more memories here for future me to find one day.