watching other people graduate from college and two days of parties and juno are making me think about high school, when we talked and posed absurdly, in ways that only characters in movies ever would.  i tend to symbolise this with the night i was lying out on the yard with my car stereo still on playing 'here' by pavement on repeat.  that never actually happened, and the night i wanted to do it happened before i could drive.  and even when i could drive i wouldn't have known how to play a song on repeat.  it got stuck on repeat once, but christine fixed it.  and i wouldn't lie in that grass for the dirt.  neurotic people have that sort of trouble with spontaneity.

but almost through another four Best Years of Your Life i'm ready to start treating that story as real: again, because of the symbolism.  

this is true: there were these two girls named meredith and julie.  a joke developed that because i kept getting them mixed up (they didn't look alike in any way) i should just make up new names for them.  i did, every time i needed to address them.  one time, i helpfully reminded myself in my notebook of the period, julie referred to herself on the phone as 'the brown-haired girl' so i would be sure which i was talking to.  she was the one i had a thing for, now that i look it up, but until just now i thought it had been meredith.  i can't picture either of them.  for a couple of weeks my group of friends at the time were connected to those two, and factually, empirically, that's as far as it goes.  i thought about them a lot with a low-fi indie soundtrack in my bedroom to back up what i scribbled about them, imagining it as a montage in someone else's movie.  or my own.

so the days of such unexamined lushness have passed.  i still quote lyrics like scripture and sing in the shower and have a song categorised away mentally for everyone i care about, except these days i realise how these things are remnants of a bygone era, or at least of an era waving goodbye effusively as it backs slowly out of the room, off into the unknown adulthood and 'real world' we've been hearing so much about lately.