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Teenage Diaries is a monthly column on navigating the oddities, culture, and experiences of high school in the modern era.
Said you wear a new perfume for each city that you visit / So you can always remember how it felt to be there.
I lifted that from a Cigarettes After Sex song. But it’s something that I do to fast-track nostalgia; cherry blossom for Rome’s cathedrals, saltwater for a summer spent in the city, powdery jasmine and chopped wood for Paris. And as the second semester of senior year hangs before my eyes in a strange, utopian limbo, I’ve hunted down the sound of senioritis for posterity.
Some say senioritis sounds like giving up, or reckless youth, or ennui. It’s hard to put my finger on it when I’m listening to country music to remind myself of America, while I sit in a stranger’s bedroom in Lyon, or when I’m on the 23rd floor of a hotel getting ready to go out while “Drank & Drugs” blasts on the TV — one of my friends insists it’s big in Europe, and after all, a semester spent in Switzerland is not a badge many at our school can boast.
Lost, I consulted my friends.
“what song is like senior yr to you”
“lemme think”
“townie by mitski”
Because tonight, there’s a party, and we’re all going, and we’re all growing up.
And I want a love that falls as fast as a body from the balcony, and I want a kiss like my heart is hitting the ground. A friend and I are sitting in the parking lot outside of the health foods shop, and she says that nothing needs to be perfect because everything is a test drive, a free trial. I’m trying hard to embrace this, but during calc, I daydream about how perfect it all could be. Being led out into the cool, tall grass under the blinking tail lights of planes as they take off. Smell that, it's wet grass, and smoke in my hair, I think I've had enough.
Maybe I’m not using the word “senioritis” correctly, but then again, do I really care? I’m a senior. Besides, I have the telltale symptoms of slipping grades and sinking motivation. Senior year, let alone its second semester, has always existed far beyond my reach. But having put 25 semesters at the same institution behind me, I’m finally acting my age.
At a competitive school, it’s difficult to remain young. In fact, I suspect that none of us have ever felt our age. At five, we imitated the motions of creasing cloth into a swaddle, craving a baby to hold in polka-dot aprons during a rainy recess. At twelve, we were Emma Chamberlain wannabes listening to Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco on our iPhone 7’s to pass the time spent on buses through sprawling suburbia. And at sixteen, we were shadows of adults, networking and sending emails asking “the important” questions. We made LinkedIns and had the firm handshakes to match. I can’t recall when it happened, but it did; a weight lifted off my shoulders and the air of seriousness which furrowed my brow relaxed. I was suddenly an expert at being a teenage girl. It’s rare that we are not asked to clean up our messes, and we all know that graduation is a once-in-a-lifetime exit as clean and sweet as a cut.
Time does not work the way it used to, like in Lorde’s “400 Lux” — We’re never done with killing time, can I kill it with you? My mother says her senior year at a Toronto Catholic school was “full of waiting, really, for anything to happen.” Once finite and never enough for clearing a to-do list, time is a well, deep and deeper, which we can’t empty fast enough. I watch the clock carefully in class, drag my feet through the halls, kill time in the car. We live for the weekend now, but someone is playing “Murder on the Dance Floor” for the fifth time tonight. “Turn this shit off, who the fuck is on aux?” Someone brought their DJ mixset to the party, and someone filed a noise complaint down the street.
These songs are the things that are easy to play back, but there are other sounds that exist in passing whose faint echoes will play out behind quiet street corners or over the backyard fence where the kids next door are hosting a party. These are the sounds that matter — us giggling in an Uber together like shaken windchimes, our secrets unfolding in our laps before us as the windows fog up in an early morning glow. Us cleaning to Caribbean rhythms in Eastern Seaboard basements, giggling and smashing cans with the heels of our shoes after the crowd clears out. The crunching tech noise when there’s a bad connection on FaceTime, and we’re stretched out on a cool bathroom floor, planes whistling as they take off overhead. When I lie in bed after it all, my ears ring with it. The cacophony of it is unmistakable. Like every song and every word spoken in an early 2000s coming-of-age film played back over itself over and over. I know my memories of high school will be just that, like my clumsy and feeble memory of watching a romcom.
But there is a beauty to this limbo, and there is an art to straddling the gap between adulthood and childhood. When I began elementary school, “Party Rock Anthem” was still charting, and boys in my class would ask me if I knew what the band fun. meant when they said their “friends were in the bathroom getting higher than the empire state.” And if you asked me at that age to picture myself as a senior, I would have struggled. I remember ogling at seniors during our all-school winter concert—how they knew how to move their hands and legs with correctness, how sure-footed and tall they stood like monolithic trees that knew the world before my entrance.
But here we are. I’m not quite a monolith at five foot five, and I woke up in a sweat a week ago realizing that I was a quarter of the way to being 72. I try to picture myself: long grey hair, a cottage in the countryside with blue and white tiles in the kitchen, living slowly. And if I lose my hearing then, I’ll know I’ve lived my years to their fullest. So maybe there’s no use in finding the sound of my senior year; to remember, I’ll pour out drinks on the basement floor and mop them up.