A linky look back at when I was 21 years old continues from this wildly meandering post, and let’s see if I can’t making this one even more labyrinthine. There’s no song to accompany the entry, so you’ll have to hum or whistle or sing one of your own conjuring. Nostalgia comes with its own soundtrack, specific and different for everyone – set yours up on Spotify, and then come back and teach me how to do it.
Once upon a time, I thought I might have the most-well-documented life of any of my friends, but considering the ease and ubiquitous manner in which we document ourselves these days, all I have are some written memories and boxes of photographic memories in concrete material form – unstored on any flash drive or lap-top. Judging from the photos I’ve been digging up, that may be for the best – and woe to the kids today growing up in a state of constant documentation. My generation was lucky to have done most of our growing up in the relative privacy of a pre-internet, pre-cel-phone world. I find myself valuing and appreciating that more as the days go by.
Of course, there was still much evidence of my sartorial mistakes, as evidenced in so many photographs, like the one above. Sheer shirts and sequin berets and vests – this was when ‘Chicago’ had made such a splash in its revival on Broadway, and I was all about this combo. No clue why I chose this particular astrological hat, but I have no clue why I chose most things I chose in 1996. Yes, mistakes were made, and some of them rather dire, but this wasn’t one of them. As ridiculous as many of my outfits were, I stand by them for what they were at the moment, and I never wore anything I didn’t love on that respective day. You have to embrace your past selves to truly love your present one. Absolutely no regrets…
Back then, I never fully appreciated or inhabited the moment. Entirely hellbent on the next thing, and what was coming up in the future, rarely did I live in the present time at hand. I know I just said absolutely no regrets, but maybe I do have a few, and that would be one of them. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how lovely and charmed that time in life was – having been raised by the world to indulge in our childhood days, I regularly paused to take stock and think, ‘Hey, I should be enjoying this as it’s the best time of my life’ but that always felt forced. My childhood came with its own traumas and tribulations, and for a socially anxious gay kid coming to terms with who he was, childhood isn’t always the rosy time it’s supposed to be, especially at a point when being gay wasn’t even talked about. When you don’t see yourself, or the possibility of your life, anywhere around you, and when it’s not mentioned or discussed even in the abstract, you do begin to wonder if you belong. That works itself out in diabolical ways. By the time I was 21 years old, I was only starting to see and understand this – and since it was only the start, I had no idea what I was doing.
Oddly enough, there is occasionally more wisdom in stumbling through certain sections of your life completely unaware of the bigger picture, pointing to an inadvertent and unintentional realization of living in the moment. When you pause in considering the greater arc and trajectory of your life, you are focusing on the day, the hour, the minute at hand – and isn’t that the essence of mindfulness? It makes for a much happier existence, and perhaps that’s the secret to eternal youth.
I remember the early spring day when the above photo was taken. On a visit to Suzie in Ithaca, I basked in the sunlight of the day after that long winter. (Winters in Ithaca are no fun joke.) Looking up, I felt the sun on my face in a way that was better than any sort of apricity as it was already spring, and winter was behind us. You can see the earliest chartreuse buds on the tree branches behind me, and I can recall the feeling of spring just beginning to unfurl. It was the feeling of being 21, of being on the verge of everything.
{Bonus shot: this is me in Ithaca again, hamming it up in the kitchen (which I never used in its traditional capacity, and not only because I never technically lived there). It was just another day on the Royal Rainbow Tour, and I was probably just tooling around town dropping Chris off to class or meeting Suzie for dinner. All in a day… all in a life.}
