#52 Why I love that scene in Lady Bird

it feels so scary / getting old

I want 'em back, I want 'em back
The minds we had, the minds we had
How all the thoughts, how all the thoughts
Moved 'round our heads, moved 'round our heads
I want 'em back, I want 'em back
The minds we had, the minds we had
It's not enough to feel the lack
I want 'em back, I want 'em back
I want ‘em

You can’t wait to get out of this city that feels like an amorphous and confusing town, the same conjunction of 5 streets and 3 neighborhoods. The last school bell rings at three forty-five and it’s time for dismissal. Grab your backpack and your friend because it’s her senior year and you told your mom you’re riding home with them. You drive back to the opposite side of town then sideways into the rolling hills and Country Club fields and next to the lake. Tiny as it ever was and completely unfit for swimming in, but it was yours. 

Your first cigarette! Cleaning your hands of the smell with Bath & Body Works pocket-size, obscenely scented body cream. You didn’t take such an immediate liking to it but you’re seventeen and you’re on fire. You drive back to the neighborhood and make a stop by the same 4 avenues lining the rest of that side of town, driving it in a loop, over and over, by five thirty p.m. Ribs is in the background then and it is in the speakers on the highway too, you’re the only friend I need / sharing beds like little kids / there is nothing else to do in this prepubescent city than to drive from the Country Club suburban million-dollar houses and back to school, to the 24-hour pharmacy for Oreos and then back home. You can’t wait to start your life elsewhere without the faintest clue that one day you’ll be twenty-seven and borrowing your dad’s car to drive through the same four avenues, Ribs in the background, it drives you crazy / getting old. 

The years go by and are followed by more dazzling, technicolor ones; the first years abroad, when your prepubescent little spirit leaves the prepubescent city and shapeshifts into something unrecognizable and yet deeply understood. The decade behind you leaves everything prior as though it were wrapped under layers of transparent film, elastic and sticky, coming to you in flashes when you’re driving around town. You couldn’t wait to get out of here when you were seventeen and now here you are. The afternoon light bathes the trees in the same way — the Sun above you is glittering. The leaves mark their patterns on the concrete, streets laden with potholes just as they always were. The decade behind you has been the end of your teens and your twenties, and you’re climbing the steady road of the last of them, with the kind of conscience you can’t fake. 

Remember when you couldn’t wait to leave it all behind? The suffocating roles and the endless summers. You were so sure that the world was waiting on the other side and you couldn’t wait until you got to it. The streets here look the same and you’re always taking the same routes to the same places and you’re only ever in some parts of town because that’s where everyone is. Remember when you played Iris and you’d ride home with your friend from the party who lived next door to you and you would sing through the darkened streets, say hello again on Monday? 

The world is waiting and you finally get on your way after the last school bell rings and your life is sprawled right where your eyes can barely reach, rolling hills and Country Club beef dishes and frappé lemonade just behind you. The world is waiting and you just can’t wait a second longer and without knowing it, barely ever registering it, the world is right there and it’s September and another school year begins, far away from here. The world is waiting and then it’s been nine years and you’re twenty-seven now, the sky is just as blue, the yellow trees are blooming and you wondered whether you’d ever be back to see them glow in April. The world is waiting and then you remember — the twinkling afternoon light, the echoing patterns, leaf after leaf, sunlight reflecting the rearview mirror. Telling your parents you’re sleeping over at a friend’s house who told her parents she’d be sleeping at yours. The parties and the mud-stained shoes and the bottled sangria and the drive-arounds in the same three cyclical neighborhoods — enough to make your head spin — the night always sprawled out before you. Believing in their infinite impossibilities. 

Now you are twenty-seven and you play Ribs in the car and you text your friends a photo of the console, the trees lining up the road down the same four avenues you used to drive through. Passing by the park with the built-in exercise machinery / the corner coconut milkshake place / the sloping valleys by the Country Club, glimpses of a bright green golf course / the orange sun dipping, slowly, behind the mountains / you’re the only friend I need / sharing beds like little kids / 
we’ll laugh until our ribs get tough / 
but that will never be enough