Midnight Pub

highschool

~dragfyre

do you remember the days when you were a preteen indie rock head? when you would wear corduroy and do your hair in the spunky, unwashed look? when you wore powder blue shirts with hello kitty on them?

do you remember after the concert, when you always used to go to the back room and have a secret smoke with the band? when you all used to stay at the lead singer's place and make up fairy stories about the two friends who travelled from one ocean to the other?

and do you remember your first kiss, behind the taco bell in kingston? when your breath smelled like peppermint and his smelled like sprite? the skies were patched with clouds, and the moon struggled to take a peek?

those were the days before the big decisions had to be made, in that limbo called highschool when the big event in your life was learning to drive. it was a time full of colour, full of sound and fury, a confusing time of crazy road trips and crazier acid trips, when everything was about growing away from your parents and making it big for yourself.

as the elders timed their harvests by the moon, so did you wait for the waxing of the Gap and Club Monaco for your back-to-school harvest. And the big impression of the year was the first day back, when you dazzled the world with a new you that was the same as it always was, but with a new cover.

to loiter, to tarry, to chill and to lounge: the children of the 90's grew up in a concrete nursery with only bright plumage and beads -- pink hair and tamagotchis -- to adorn them, and adorn themselves to the fullest.

stuck in that strange microcosm, your locker changed every year, along with your heroes: one year was nkotb, the next was r&b, the next was some whatever you couldn't quite tell, but it was always your struggle to show off your Self in your youthful beautiful way.


violetsoup

my adolescent years were very dull. it was an all-girls school, so there was nothing much in the way of teenage romance or thrill. i remember my itchy uniform, white shirt, navy trousers, maroon jumper. clunky doc martens and my ugly grebo haircut, shaved at the sides, 4 non blondes blasting through my earphones as i slogged my way to school each morning.

barely paying attention in physics classes, scribbling in the margins of my exercise book. listening to the soothing drone of my geriatric latin teacher dictating a paragraph for us to translate, wracking my brain to remember the right verbs. hiding underneath the stairs in the tower block during lunch break, writing in my diary about all the things that troubled me. blue biro staining my hand. tensing up at the sound of footsteps approaching. walking the mile in PE, my beat-up white nikes dragging across the gravel of the track.

going home and rotting in front of my computer, or on the living room floor with my guitar, trying to learn the chords to whatever song i liked best. sitting on the sofa after dinner with a copy of bertrand russell's 'problems of philosophy', trying to understand his word salad. but i don't understand it.

looking at my reflection in the school's bathroom mirrors. seeing it multiply endlessly into that weird sickly shade of green that mirrors turn into when they're parallel to each other. ripping off a hangnail. scraping my hair back with gel and mousse, as if it made me look smarter. it didn't.

and just before the GCSE exams came up. shaving it all off in the kitchen, watching the straggly brown locks fall onto the linoleum floor. running a hand over my head. and how it felt like velvet. the deputy head will be fuming when she sees what i've done! shaved heads aren't allowed. but i have to do my exams, don't i?

i don't miss those days very much, if at all. but if i could meet that version of myself again, i'd tell her to cherish every moment, because there's a tiny part of my current self that finds comfort in those memories. i don't lose myself in those memories. but sometimes i wander around them like a museum exhibit and smile when i see them. and that spotty-faced teenage dyke, with her shaved head and crooked teeth and untucked school shirt, she'd probably be quite happy with how i've turned out.

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