me and Bek in 2012
it’s 11:08 pm.
It’s 11:08pm and I don’t know if that is significant, but if it was a Taylor Swift song, it would be.
I’m listening to “You All Over Me” for the first time and I’m trying to remember where I was in 2008 when Fearless was released. I was 17 and so bright and so unsure. I felt the weight of obligation and I sacrificed so many dreams in the name of future guarantees. I felt so unworthy of love and belonging and achieving the dreams I was too afraid to say—but I quietly hoped for it all.
I remember being 17.
I remember being 17 and waiting for a ride because I didn’t have a car, listening to music on my teal iPad mini and watching the boy across from me on the bench. There’s a Taylor Swift song for every boy I’ve hoped over and his was “Teardrops on My Guitar,” only solidified when he gave me two of his guitar pics. I wore them on a chain around my neck until I found out he was as in love with another girl as a boy can be at 17.
I remember a summer night in Indiana.
I remember a summer night in Indiana; it was before Fearless came out, maybe in 2005. I was wearing a bright pink t-shirt and we were out late. It began raining and instead of hiding from the storm, we laughed and ran through it. I don’t remember their names and we don’t keep in touch, but when I think about how Fearless feels, it feels like that memory.
I remember a 2012 Chicago night.
I remember a 2012 Chicago night and running through a downtown park and laughing—for someone who doesn’t like to run, apparently I do it often when I’m happy. I wore a blue and green flannel I bought for $3 and I jumped on my best friend’s back. I don’t remember who took the photo, but I remember how happy we felt.
I remember being 17.
At 17, I thought I’d shortly meet a boy who would buy me a ring and I always thought by 29 I’d have my own family. It’s been a decade and now I buy myself rings and I’ve learned both when to leave and when not to let go. Sometimes you have to do both, but what you learn to always hold onto is your own becoming.
“I lived, and I learned, and found out what it was to turn around and see that we were never really meant to be.”
I don’t talk to that boy or the folks from that rainy night and I’ve left almost every dream I had at 17, but sometimes I still talk to my best friend from college. Yet it all feels lost and distant and maybe it’s just because I’ve changed. I wish I could tell that girl at 17 that she can feel it all and it’s okay to cry over boys, but you’ll remember the dancing in the rain and the laugher in the park even more. I wish I could tell her that all the belonging she needs is within herself and that the right people will find her at the right time. Yes, it sounds cliche, but she’s always loved poetry and happy endings. Her happiness will come, just not in the ways she expected.
Tonight happiness found her on a black barstool in an apartment she’s paying for herself with her 2nd mug of chamomile tea and a plant she’s managed to keep alive. She’s listening to a song (on repeat for 63 minutes and counting) that was written when she was 17 and she’s absorbing the feelings she had then and the ways she’s left and lost and become in the in-between. She’s melancholy, but she’s also happy. She’s learned that both of those feelings can exist at the same time. She’s learned that loss is sometimes necessary for becoming and so is letting go. So she is letting go.
“I lived, and I learned, and found out what it was to turn around
And see that we were never really meant to be
So I lied, and I cried, and I watched a part of myself die
‘Cause no amount of freedom gets you clean
I still got you all over me.”
This time the “you all over me” is the feeling of being 17 and the memory of who I used to be. I’m still dancing and crying to the same songs in new cities and becoming the woman I’ll look back on at 40 as who I used to be.