This Is Your Life
(This post was originally written in January 2024, but I guess I never actually published it. Sadly, I still mean every word.)
I was thirteen when The Beautiful Letdown was released by Switchfoot. I remember listening to the CD through my wired headphones, watching the road while my dad drove my siblings and I the five or six hours to meet my mom who lived five states away. They would be asleep while I quietly learned all of the words, probably not understanding a single one. It was the year of my first actual potential boyfriend situation. He took me and my youngest sister on a long bike ride to a tunnel I'd never seen before. Our first “date” was a Lynyrd Skynyrd concert (I did not yet know most of them were dead), but mom and I watched from the grass, while he and his dad watched from their seats. We took him to the beach, where I received the worst sunburn of my life. I remember the teardrop tan line on my back that stuck around for years. He gave me a bracelet I still have and some sweet memories of the first and, as far as I know, only time a boy liked me back.
Our relationship was complicated by my mom’s relationship with his married dad. I remember when his mom pulled me aside while he was playing video games with his friends to ask me about my mom and his dad. I remember being nervous around him, but he was much more nervous around me, so when summer ended, so did we, and I never saw him again. Or maybe he just never really liked me.
I think this was also the year I was first paid to babysit. I’d watch my cousins and the little girl of one of mom’s friends. My mom asked to borrow money she never repaid, and the person who broke into her car stole the money I’d left inside “for safekeeping.” I hid $51 in a wallet somewhere and only remembered it was inside a speaker on the very last day we were there. I read Harry Potter for the first time at mom’s because Dad wouldn’t let me. Thirteen was the birthday of my first and only surprise party. My grandpa walked my brother and I and a few kids from church to his house, where he and Oma had set up yard games, skies made of wood and rope, another rope with knots that we had to untie without letting go. We had a cake and Oma painted my nails and it remains my favorite birthday memory.
Sometimes when I think of these moments, they take on a documentary hue, like I am watching the life of someone I never knew. I am a very different person now, though I do still hide behind my also timid dad during the few social events we still attend together. She was quiet and bookish; I talk too much and can’t even make myself listen to an audiobook. She was no better at making friends than I am, but she was much better at giving them her time. Neither of us had any plans, but she did have hope.
Twenty years later, I found out Switchfoot released a new album, the same songs in different styles. I am thirty-three now, dissatisfied with so much about this life I’ve made for myself by failing to make a life for myself. I cried, listening to these words again, now familiar with the meaning of songs I know by heart. “Fumbling his confidence and wondering why the world has passed him by. Hoping that he’s bent for more than arguments and failed attempts to fly. We were meant to live for so much more. Have we lost ourselves?”
I’ve made a lot of promises to little me, promises that I’ve broken and forgotten. I won’t make any more. I hope, soon, to find you somewhere living inside.
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