I was sixteen once. A mess of a sixteen-year-old. And, god damn it, I loved him. I wanted to be him the way water wants to be milk, feeling transparent and knowing that I’d be better off creamy and cold and cloying with sugars that most people don’t even think about. I tried everything to be like him. I listened to the music he listened to, read the poetry he read, joined the school literary magazine, tried out for plays (despite my incredible fear of public speaking); I even dressed like him.
And so, this was me. Notice the only pair of skinny jeans that I could find at the mall. They were on clearance, because they weren't really cool yet, and I wore them constantly, washing them more than twice a week and driving my mother crazy with the amount of laundry I created. (I actually still have them, more hole and thread than cloth at this point.) Notice the side-swept bangs that covered my face until I was a mouth and an eye. Poetry and the observations that sparked it. Notice the plastic framed glasses. The hand-me-down vintage shirts that I wore to mimic his band t-shirts that I didn't have the cash to buy.
And so, this was him. See any similarities?
What is it about someone that makes them appear more important than yourself at that age? And how is it possible to be so hopelessly self-absorbed that you almost drown in your own feelings, and yet wish with every fiber of your being to simultaneously be absorbed into someone else's self? These are the kinds of questions I wish I'd asked myself back then, because there's no way for the me who exists now to know how I would have answered. It's like asking questions of a book or a photo album. No answers, just clues.
