An Inhuman Condition

IV: Good Bye

Twelve years later the song sounds so contrived. It was probably always that way, but nostalgia has a way of making the past better. Over the years, the details of a story change slightly – they become alienated from the event and mold into a version of things like a well-worn cushion or forged steel. With every retelling, a memory becomes a new thing like a game of telephone. We are revisionists changing our history into something more meaningful than it was.

As such, I assume I thought the song was good. I was an idiot after all – just a kid in his first year of high school hanging around his first girlfriend: both of them clueless what that really signified. New Year’s Eve marched in like a revolution taking no prisoners. We were on the brink of the year 2000, and I was a fool in her presence. We were all dumb back then. Somehow the people in charge thought computer systems would crash, grow sentience and erase the debt record. Nothing happened, but it sure felt like it could – potential energy.

It’s interesting how easily significance breeds in these unsure moments. Questions find uncomfortable answers, and we’re forced to really examine ourselves. What we find is often even more enigma and anxiety. It’s these times when people look to a god or doctrine to give them direction. Lost in the vacant apathy of the nineties, she was my only comfort. But comfort is fleeting, lives change, and we fell apart in turbulent adolescence. Now she’s just a romanticized version of the past, but this song always reanimates her.

It was one of her favorites. I bought the album and listened to it repeatedly. I would play it as I went to sleep at night, and I can still sing most of it today. But one song in particular brings me to New Year’s Eve 1999, and of course it would. It’s perfect. It simultaneously expresses the emotional void and impotent rebellion of my teenage years while serving as a reminder of how cliché it all was.

It was a time in our lives when we thought everything was going to be important. I remember feeling like I was on the precipice of another universe waiting to swallow me whole. I was in high school for the first time in my life spending the holiday with my girlfriend. After this chapter in our lives, things would change. We had graduation, college, work and whatever would come next lingering over us. The year was ending; the decade was ending. We were starting a new millennium. At midnight we were waiting for the fireworks standing alone on her parent’s lawn. There was a foreboding movement in the air as the paradigm shifted, and I caught a glimpse of it lingering for a minute in the winter air. I remember holding her hand, and only one thing comes to mind.

“Maybe we don’t want to live in a world where innocence is so short.”