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| circa 2009 |
I might have been fourteen when they took that picture of me goofing around with my high school friends. I was really lost and anxious back then, but somehow I was also very careless and free at the same time.
I remember spending those summers in a big house in a small town, walking up the streets towards cafés and pizza shops, hanging out with other kids and my cousins, rescuing a dog, being in love too and giving first and second kisses; but still, everything was brand new.
The summer was nice, not too hot and much better than the foggy and rainy winters of that town.
Back then I could have cake in between meals without a single doubt, because I was skinny asf.
I also went to dance lessons, but during the summer the school closed.
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| Small town memories might be lame but they are good enough |
I listened to rock bands and dated a kid who played the bass. The romance lasted for two or three weeks. But the heath of summer lasted longer.
I was there, walking downtown, boys trying to flirt with me for no apparent reason. I enjoyed it. The attention was also new. And then the night came. I went to those lame garage parties some kids with inattentive parents sometimes held. It was very hard to drink beer, but we still manage to have fun.
Not knowing what the future was holding for us, and with zero intention of knowing, we let ourselves go with the excitement of our first youth.
Make up, magazines, jeans cut to our waist, Mika's Everybody is gonna love today playing over and over, dreaming with New York... a city beyond our possibilities, wishing love could last forever and not just a few weeks.
Now all that seems distant and romantic. The corner where I had to cross the street to go to the park, the flavor of brownies in the middle of the day, lemonade, scars and cuts in my fingers after playing with branches, lying on the floor or the blue sky... we didn't wanted to end, I still wished it hadn't end, but it was only inevitable.
I spend an afternoon making a video for Youtube, I recorded bits of my life here and there, watched The sisterhood of traveling pants and wished for a friendship and a pair of jeans as good as those. There was so much I didn't know and wanted to, but ignorance was the preamble for adventure.
I tried to kiss a boy one of those nights, but got shy and got scolded for leaving the party so late. But I couldn't help it and didn't care.
We ate pizza, made Skype calls at 2:00 am that lasted until 3:00 am, we swore it was gonna be like that for ever and ever and ever.
I grew up. Went to London, Tokyo, Seoul, Amsterdam... still there are certain things, certain moments in that little hometown of yours, where you rave to certain songs and certain sounds just like everyone else in the biggest cities your dreams could imagine. We sang to Use Somebody to Kings of Leon, or maybe we didn't, but certainly listened to it while all those emotions where happening inside of us.
As small as we were, as broken as we felt, we did our best... we laughed and felt and loved and regretted it and eventually got over it, but the scars and the marks of those years, now they are here with us, and they are truly eternal, witnesses of our craziness, or recklessness, or fearless selves jumping to a pool after our last exam, still with a school uniform, but knowing we were free for the next two or four weeks.
Walking around those small places now will never be same. It ended, we said goodbye, we didn't see each other daily anymore, some of us discovered we couldn't stay friends because we had nothing else in common than the eleven subjects we shared together. However, we will always have Kiss Me Thru the Phone to remember how it was.
Late afternoons that became nights, photographs that got lost due to our lack of Facebook, dead pets, casual pizza dinning, the unawareness that Korea existed, LG phones and the fact that we knew we were growing up and didn't know what to do with it.
So we finally did. And now we are here and there. And we might forget, but the memories will always be there. On the street, in your old room, in the stars you asked for wishes.
