I started taking contraception again in May and felt my 19-year-old self pressing up against me. She had started birth control for the first time a little more than 10 years ago. When she walked to and from the GP to pick up the prescription for her first pack of contraception, she felt the world crack open somewhat, like this was maturity. She took the first tablet calmly while watching Golden Girls, feeling far away from her first boyfriend (he was away somewhere, and the responsibility of contraception was wholly in my hands anyway).
Now, more than 10 years later, I have experienced some of that cracking open but not all that I thought I would or wanted to. This time, I took my first dose of the minipill with trembling hands, feeling sick before even swallowing it—I had 10 more years of hormonal experience, whether synthetic or not, and I was fearful of the wreck my mind and body might become. Whether I liked it or not, I was scared.
I don’t often feel so in touch with the younger versions of me, but when I do, they assert a kind of power: I worry that they would be disappointed. Maybe the current me is disappointed but prefers to shift blame on to younger me, like, you expected too much, it’s your fault that the dimensions of our life can never be enough. I long for those younger versions too—the things I could tell her, the nostalgia that hurts.
I spent the weekend rinsing Fontaines D.C’s new single Favourite. I wondered if I could write about it in a detached way, the way criticism is supposed to be. But watching the video in my parent’s attic—surrounded by albums full of my own childhood photos—had an emotional effect on me that rarely happens nowadays.
The video, filled with grainy VHS footage of the band as kids, signals the song’s temporal aspect. It’s also there in the looping guitar riff that is jangly like The Cure (a nice slice of musical nostalgia that doesn’t feel copycat). There’s not so much a verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge chorus pattern as a mix of two main melodies that swap around each other, brushing up close. It feels like how memory feels because it doesn’t stick to that linear, climatic (bridge) narrative but rather spirals towards some essence of what it is to remember. It’s a love song too, but a long song about loving someone over a long period of time, how that kind of love feels so different to the instant gratification of limerence, the all-encompassing rapture of it. Long love spirals too, loops around itself.
But more than anything, it feels like a song about the burdensome passage of time. The line that centres this feeling is towards the end:
Ah, it makes sense when you understand
The misery made me another marked man
And I'm always looking over my shoulder
And each new day, I get another year older
Shoulder bounce through the frame of a door
Chewed into shape like a stone on the shore
Chewed into shaped like a stone on the shore reframes some belief about life as a series of important events: instead, it’s a constant shaping, happening as imperceptibly as a rock eroded to stone, to a pebble, to sand. The use of chewed evokes the humdrum; chewing is an unglamourous action necessary for existence. Chewing cud, repeatedly. I’ve thought a lot about the lack of glamour in living long, in long love and in brushing against the past and the future. Listening to Brat contains a wishfulness for me, the ephemeral moments of power that we want to last forever. But even in Brat this is interrupted with Charli’s moments of insecurity. Brat isn’t so much about looking back, but the now and the future. Favourite, on the other hand, sounds like that nostalgia that hurts, the day of sunshine after a string of rainy days, the way this process is rinsed and repeated. It’s life, basically.
I’ve also been preoccupied with aging in subconscious spaces. Over the weekend I dreamt that I was older, maybe 40 or 50. At this dream-age, I was thinking less of how many years had passed and more about how many I had left. As the dream went on, I got younger and returned to my non-dream age. 30: this arbitrary age of things being sorted out, the expectation that I know what I am doing. In my dream, even my sense of age was jumbled, as if I was pressing up against an older self. This is not a sense I have felt much in waking life, having mainly been preoccupied with younger selves. The images of them are more vivid, but are they any more non-fiction than the imagined older me? What might the 19-year-old me think about pressing up against me now?
[As it’s coming up to halfway through 2024, I have decided to try and write weekly—if only for 6 months. This is week 1.]
Aging is an odd topic for me. I turn 32 in a week and a half, yet in a lot of ways (autistic virgin who can't drive and lives with mother) I'm still a developmentally arrested teenager. I keep telling myself it's not too late, that I can still go out and live eventually. I hope so.
(Best of luck in your six month experiment, by the way - a Rookie diarist rides again!)