This Is Our Youth.

Last week a friend from college emailed me a file containing a brand new song he and his band had just recorded.  "I wanted you to hear it first." he told me.  "It's a nod to REM's Pop Song 89 and I have the fondest memory of the hours you and I spent listening to that song, their albums, in the dorm."

******

A few weeks ago I had to travel to Florida for work.  I took a cab from my apartment to the airport and as the cabbie and I were approaching my departure gate Pearl Jam's Better Man came on the radio.  Without even realizing it, I started singing out loud.  "You like this song?" the cabbie asked me, watching me in his rear view mirror.  Blushing, laughing, I nodded.

It's amazing how you can go years and years without hearing, without even thinking about a song, but then, suddenly, it's there in front of you, for your ears taking.  You are a teenager again and you can't help but remember every single word, every chorus.

Whoever would have imagined that I might one day be nostalgic for the 90's?

****** 

The other night I finally (finally!) watched the film Before Sunrise, the first from Richard Linklater's epic romantic trilogy, which follows the characters Jesse and Celine for a single night in Vienna.  (I don't really know how this film escaped my viewing catalogue for twenty years.  Last summer, a friend and I were discussing Linklater's Boyhood and I commented on having never seen any of the "sunrise movies."  My friend stared at me in disbelief for a quick second before going on to tell me how if there ever was a Kelli movie, these three were it and I should watch them immediately, like now, get on it.)

(Turns out he was right.)

(When it comes to movies, he always is.)

(Never mind that it took me another ten months to watch the thing.)

Still. I finally did see it and just as predicted, I fell head over heels for the story, the characters, and their single night together.  Of course from the very opening scenes where we meet our hero and heroine on a train, I couldn't help but think - particularly as I listened to the character Jesse explain his wanderings across Western Europe - of my own train travels some thirteen years ago, armed only with a youthful energy, a blissful (but not utterly naive) innocence, a backpack, a guidebook, a Eurorail pass, and a desire to see it all.

******

It's rather funny, in a charming sort of way, to think back about the choices we made when we were young, the things we did because we didn't know anything else.  Because this was all there was, all that we learned thus far.  Nothing ahead of us but hope.  And possibility.  And chance.

Now, as a woman in my mid-thirties, I know that I have lost a lot of the starry-eyed purity I had when I was a teenager and young twenty-something, a girl with nothing but hours and hours to listen to my favorite Grunge-era rock bands on repeat.  If I was to redo my backpacking route today, more seasoned traveler that I am, I'm sure I would do a multitude of things differently.  I mean, I probably should have gone to the library for at least an hour or seven when I compare the time my college pal and I devoted to absorbing the entire REM catalogue versus studying.  If I could jump back in time on that Eurorail, I would tell myself to add a day or two and go to Finland...after all I was so close - right there in Denmark! 

Who wouldn't want the opportunity to pass along advice to our younger selves knowing what we know now as older, wiser adults?

And yet. Recommendations, suggestions, and advice aside, (because we both know I wouldn't listen) I like to imagine that I would just give my 22 year old self a knowing nod; maybe a hug or a squeeze on the shoulder.  It's not all going to be easy, I'd tell her, but it is going to be alright.  You, young lady, who famously scrawled in a very old diary over twenty years ago about how you just wanted to start living and experiencing your life!!!!! are going to do just that.  On your own terms and your own way.  Just keeping trusting yourself.

Who knows?  Perhaps my younger self would turn off her Discman for a moment, look up at me and nod knowingly in return.  Maybe she'd tell me, in a wise beyond her years moment of clarity, to (with an eye roll) stop being so damn anxious about things that are out of your control.  Ugh.  That's so adult of you.

And more importantly - perhaps she would remind me of what I promised myself at 22.  Of what I told myself I'd never forget:
  
Keep the faith.
Keep going.
Hold on to that girl who wants to see the world. 
Keep reaching.